The Last of Something

On John, Carolyn, and the thing we've never quite replaced (and no, this is NOT another piece about CBK's fashion)

Hi there,

Are you watching Love Story, the new series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy? I’m surprised by my reaction to it. I lived through the 90s, and I’m not usually into nostalgia, but I was hit with this heartache, a combination of grief and longing for that era.

Back then, we only had tabloids, magazines, and the news. No Instagram, no curated content feed, no quick missives on Threads. And so we only got fragments of John and Carolyn: a photograph outside their apartment in Tribeca, a grainy image at an airport, or a glimpse of that stunning Narciso Rodriguez slip dress at their secret wedding.

For straight women of that era, John was the idea of a man. He rollerbladed without a shirt through Manhattan, and rode his bike in a suit on his way to work. He picked his dog Friday’s poop as a good citizen would. I still remember seeing that photo in a tabloid while waiting in line at the supermarket.

One of my friends told me stories of John jogging by her parent’s house front porch here in the Hamptons, shirtless of course, and super friendly. He always waived hello and smiled. It was, of course, a huge thrill.

He walked around with nonchalance and with an impossible shadow: he was the son of Camelot, member of one of the most iconic American families, raised by Jackie Kennedy Onassis. American royalty without a crown, historical, and almost mythological. And yet he seemed entirely unburdened by it. Or at least, he made it look that way, which was a huge part of his appeal.

And then there was her.

Carolyn Bessette walked into public consciousness blond, severe in the best way, and always stylish without ever seeming to try. Her connection to Calvin Klein gave her an edge that went beyond fashion; she was the 90s, personified. For those of us who were born outside the United States, she was almost unreal. She looked like what America promised to be, the most distilled, sophisticated and aspirational version of itself: powerful, modern, cool, and devastatingly beautiful.

As the “it couple”, John and Carolyn existed at a distance, and that made them luminous. You couldn’t scroll through their life, you had to imagine it.

But it all ended 3 years after their wedding.

I was traveling for work to Boulder, Colorado when the news broke. The shock was breathtaking. I immediately thought of Princess Diana and, like her, it felt like a cruel loss of members of a royal family whose lives were in the precipice of blooming.

Fast forward to almost 27 years later, and here we are, with unlimited access to the most intimate and exhausting details of everyone’s lives. Spectacle, click bait, vulgarity and outrageousness seem the only way to relevance.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for 90s fashion right now (too much, to be honest), but Love Story makes me long for something much harder to find: people whose lives make me quietly raise my own standards, and who exude chicness in the broadest sense. As a way of being, a way of moving through life with depth, beauty and mystery. John and Carolyn had it. They were the last of something. We just didn’t know it yet.

Sending love and 90s nostalgia,

Patricia