It's Not That The Birkin Bag Is The Wrong Size

What's really wrong with Ryan Murphy's badly styled Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

Of all the unimportant stories of the past week, by far the most important is the furor over Ryan Murphy’s new show about JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, which I guess he is calling American Love Story. If you read any celebrity or style-oriented publications online, this story was major. It’s been in roughly five of Puck’s subject lines since Tuesday.

The first-look images of actress Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy were released to widespread criticism. This is because CBK is a style icon, perhaps the style icon for Gen X women. She’s the ur-moodboard reference that all the other moodboard references come from. She’s the blueprint. Her sense of minimalism and elegance remain as appealing now as they did in the late nineties. Exhibit A: this outfit.

Exhibit B: The Ryan Murphy version of such an outfit.

I REBUKE THIS!

The preview images of Sarah Pidgeon as CBK are disorienting in their wrongness. There’s the obviously empty Birkin, the coat in the wrong shade of camel and far too thin-looking, the hair too frosty, not golden enough…in another image (not featured here) she’s wearing what appear to be Madewell jeans with a kick flare and an Hermes belt??? WHAT?!

Then this outfit emerged from a shooting day in New York and I balked at the fact that it was even worse. CONVERSE? What is with the sleeve length being too short on that blazer? The COLOR of the skirt?!

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But it’s not just the clothes, or the hair, which was apparently a wig in the promo photos and still looks weird on the shoot day¹. The problem goes beyond how Sarah’s styled. (None of this is Sarah Pidgeon’s fault.) It even goes beyond the obvious differences in quality between clothes made now and clothes made 30 years ago.

Something more fundamental is missing that dooms the entire show.

It’s glamour.

That’s what Carolyn had.

Glamour is the secret, not style on its own.

Glamour is what made her an icon. Let’s go through each component of glamour as defined by Virginia Postrel to see how Carolyn fulfills them.

Effortlessness/Grace

Carolyn almost always looked effortless. She mostly sported a clean face with a slick of red lipstick on occasion. Her hair was never fussily styled while still being beautiful. Done-but-undone. The neutral color palette of her wardrobe assisted with this, to be sure, since it’s always easier to pair neutrals together than colors. Even her casual looks had an air of unstudied elegance.

But none of the outfits in the above collage are groundbreaking.

They are all very simple.

They sing because of how Carolyn carried them. Her bearing was so graceful that she elevated simple things.

This quality of appearing effortless is especially appealing—and especially quixotic—for us in the present day because it’s the golden mean between the two extremes of our time. On one end of the extreme, we have the hyperfeminine uncanny valley perfection of the Kardashian sisters…the Instagram aesthetic, and the relentless elimination of uniqueness therein. This is EFFORT with caps lock on.

And on the other end, we also inhabit an America where young people, old people, and everyone in between apparently believes it is acceptable to wear Simpsons pajama pants and Crocs-and-socks everywhere, including restaurants, clubbing, and the airport. To wit, I was at South Coast Plaza today and I saw dozens of people wearing PAJAMA PANTS. I am embarrassed for all of them. This is the complete lack of effort.

Carolyn’s look was polished but never overdone. Everything fits her perfectly. (She had model proportions so that part was likely easy.) Her face isn’t classically beautiful per se but it’s striking and she knew how to play up her best features.

I’m sure she put a great deal of thought into how she looked, especially once she became a target of the paparazzi.

But she doesn’t look like she put a lot of thought into it.

That’s the magic of glamour. It’s an illusion we’d all prefer to believe.

Mystery

Here is where I say something uncomfortable. People who die relatively young and beautiful (especially women) are often more captivating to us than they would have been had they lived². Because of Carolyn’s tragic early death, people can project any number of imagined futures onto her. Like Diana, like Marilyn, like Dorothy Dandridge, like Simonetta Vespucci. An untimely death cloaks them all in mystery. And mystery is a key component of glamour.

Despite the invasive press attention that Carolyn and JFK Jr received as a couple, she was a celebrity before social media and before the sickening tabloid heyday of the early 2000s. Yes, the paps captured their disagreements and their dinner dates. But contrasted with the celebrities of our time, we have never seen her ‘morning routine’. She never vlogged her pedicure appointment, or tried to sell us a candle that allegedly smelled like her vagina³.

CBK has a level of distance—both temporally and emotionally—that only serves to make her more appealing. People love to project onto others aspects of their own identities. Mystery is what makes that possible for public figures.

Mystery is also the scarcest resource for celebrities in an age of social media. They aren’t just surveilled by the public. They conduct surveillance on themselves. They are all their own Hedda Hoppers. And it’s actually really boring.

Dreams of Escape and Transformation

Listen, you guys, if Carolyn had not married someone named John F Kennedy Jr none of us would be talking about her. And the final component of what makes her glamorous is simply that she married into a famous family that has positioned itself as American royalty⁴. She married a man who was effectively a prince.

This is an appealing fantasy and I don’t care what you tell me to the contrary. Basically every little girl dreams of being chosen by a handsome prince who will whisk her into a rarefied world of privilege. It’s an archetypal story. Carolyn’s has a gloss of American pseudo-democracy over it but the contours are the same.

To the observer who sees her photograph on Pinterest or even back in her day in the tabloids, she embodies a fantasy of escape, the final component of glamour. Glamour makes you believe that such a transformation—from working PR at Calvin Klein to becoming American royalty—is possible.

You can know that this fantasy has a dark side, as the press attention intensified and the couple had problems in their marriage in the months leading up to their deaths. And yet you can still find it a compelling fantasy. Glamour is tricky that way.

So yeah, with Ryan Murphy’s show, the bad styling is a problem. But so is the attitude of “telling the real story” of this beautiful young couple, their troubled marriage, and tragic deaths. (Especially since Ryan Murphy doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a storyteller for good taste! This man is going to exploit the story of this woman, trust!!!)

We don’t want the real story.

We want the glamorous fantasy.

We want Carolyn to represent an ideal.

We do not want to “know” her. We want Carolyn to remain bound in her time like a butterfly in amber. And I know that this is kind of weird! Because it is kind of dehumanizing, too! But I think it’s the hidden reason why everyone is so upset.

Sometimes we want icons to remain as icons. The more we try to “tell their real story” the less satisfying the story becomes.

Related: I really enjoyed this comprehensive roundup of what we know about Carolyn’s favorite beauty products.

1. I think this is meant to be from her younger years before she went super blonde but even still if you look at photos of Carolyn her hair was darker than this when she was young.

2. This is obviously very morbid and yet in a patriarchal culture is it at all surprising?

3. Gwynnie subtweet. She was famous at the same time as CBK and they are both tall, elegant blondes. But Gwyneth is not glamorous anymore. I’m sure she doesn’t care.

4. I think they are still a messy family to be clear!!!!