Last summer, FX released early photos of Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon in their “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” costumes. The public went berserk, denouncing Pidgeon’s Bessette wardrobe in particular as tacky fast fashion far beneath the woman known for her minimalist ’90s elegance.
Showrunner Connor Hines and EP Ryan Murphy heeded the criticism and replaced the original costume designer with Rudy Mance, a three-time Emmy nominee and veteran of Murphy’s productions who started his career as a fashion assistant at Condé Nast. He knew how fascinated people were with the self-made woman who worked as a publicist at Calvin Klein before marrying America’s most eligible bachelor of the 1980s and ’90s. And he understood how influential she remains as a style icon to this day, nearly 30 years after she died in a plane crash with her husband and sister in 1999.
In a matter of days, Mance overhauled the costumes, sourcing for Pidgeon’s character vintage items from Prada, Valentino, Yohji Yamamoto and, of course, Calvin Klein. He poured over Sunita Kumar Nair’s 2023 photo book, “CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion,” and made a sprawling “serial killer” board of side-by-side photos of the real couple and the actors. The biggest challenge, he said, was puzzling out who CBK was before she became famous. (She is still an enigma, having never given an interview in her lifetime.)
“He was photographed since the day he was born, practically,” Mance said. “But for her, there was so much less information until they got together and she started being photographed so much. So I essentially worked backward and looked at the designers that she was wearing toward the end of her life, and I let that inform me about who she was at the start of our story, around 1993.”
’90s Minimalism
When we first meet Carolyn, she is a rising star at Calvin Klein, the bastion of 1990s clean lines and neutral tones. Her wardrobe reflects that: a timeless black turtleneck here, a slim black trouser there. Black was a constant for her, as we see in the vintage wool agnès b. turtleneck she pairs with Levi’s when visiting the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port for the first time.
“All of the jeans were vintage,” Mance said. “She wore 517’s, which is their bootcut. I found a video that someone had taken — very grainy and shot on an early camcorder — of the two of them at Hyannis Port at some point when they were dating, and she was wearing Levi’s 517’s, but they were much baggier (than usual). We found a baggier pair that was a little bit too light, so then we dyed them and airbrushed them.”
Groundbreaking Simplicity
CBK got married in a custom silk crepe slip gown designed by her friend Narciso Rodriguez, who has since worked with Michelle Obama and many A-list celebrities. To re-create the dress, groundbreaking at the time for its simplicity, Mance’s team sourced more of the champagne-colored silk from the Italian mill that produced the fabric Rodriguez used. Anna Light, a wedding-gown couturier based in Philadelphia, made the dress, which underwent several fittings to perfect the tricky bias cut.
“The way that it hung was part of the beauty of it,” said Mance, who studied grainy footage of the nuptials from a doc called “The Lost Tapes.” “I wanted to see how it moved, when she walked, when she danced.”
Manolo Blahnik opened its archives and lent the production a pair of the same heels the bride wore. And Mance’s team hired Wing & Weft, the company that made her gloves and veil, to reproduce those finishing touches. “They still had her pattern,” he said, “so it’s as precise as we could get.”
Every Last Detail
When she became Mrs. Kennedy in 1996, CBK’s wardrobe incorporated more top-shelf designer pieces, like the camel Prada military coat she was frequently photographed wearing, or the head-to-toe Prada ensemble she sported when her husband asked the paparazzi camped outside their Tribeca apartment to give her space. In the show’s re-creation of the moment, Mance’s team dressed Pidgeon in an identical vintage Prada menswear V-neck and camel pencil skirt, but reconstructed the brown leather boots based on an original pair that was a size too big for the actress.
On the day of shooting, they swapped out one black Prada shoulder bag for another that had just arrived from Ukraine via Etsy and was exactly the same, save for different top stitching on the handle. All too aware of just how closely people would scrutinize the details, Mance was determined to nail every last one. It was, he said, a matter of “getting it right and making sure I was paying my respects to them in the most proper way.”
A version of this story first ran in the Limited Series/TV Movie issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
