2023-12-02 10:20:12
by Matteo Persivale
was the last pre-Internet icon, who died at the age of 33 in the crash of the plane piloted by her husband John-John Kennedy
On the other side of the dark waters of Martha’s Vineyard, where she sank on the plane piloted by her husband on the night of July 16, 1999, there was a strange form of immortality waiting for Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. She died at the age of thirty-three, when she was one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world, forever young and since then never out of the minds of stylists, fashion houses and stylists, symbol of what today is called quiet luxury and once upon a time, in nineties of which one of the symbolic icons with Lady Diana (and, for men’s fashion, Kurt Cobain), was simply called class.
Because her style lesson is that of a young woman from a good family – the daughter of a doctor, she worked in public relations for Calvin Klein – who had studied by heart the icons of the old high society that no longer exists today, Truman’s swans Capote, Slim Keith and Babe Paley and Ann Woodward, CZ Guest and Pamela Harriman. And she had updated their style with that of the avant-garde of the early nineties, of the Japanese like Yamamoto and Comme de Garons and of Helmut Lang.
The result? 2024, which already marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her passing, will be her year, in fashion and in bookstores: Sunita K. Nair has just published Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, a tribute in a large glossy book that analyzes with talmudic precision her always changing looks — the black turtleneck sweaters with the baggy beige corduroy trousers, the narrow black glasses, the white crepe de chine shirts with the black skirt down to the floor or with the baggy jeans that today we call boyfriend jeans and Before her they had never been seen, midi skirts worn with boots and with absolute nonchalance. Everything analyzed and very often copied verbatim from luxury and fast fashion that she would not have loved.
Fashion book? No, also given the five-star forewords by Gabriela Hearst, first lady Jill Biden and vice president Kamala Harris and Edward Enninful. CBK is also a reference for Amy Smilovic who places it at the center of her book Creative Pragmatism, in which she aims to teach the balance between modernity and functionality of which John-John Kennedy’s wife is an immortal symbol.
The long, very straight blonde hair that has since condemned generations of women to battles with jet hairdryers and the hatred of humid days with the consequent frizz effect, the makeup that is often impalpable in its simplicity, at ease in an evening dress as in jeans , very American but also European and Japanese. He used fashion as a means not as an end, as a very fine strategist: he died without giving interviews because from his mother-in-law Jackie – whom he did not know – he learned the decisive importance of silence, mystery and the spaces between words that the public is forced to fill on its own , once you have caught their attention.
Pre-Internet icon, the latest, analogue and elegant, antidote to the social chaos of this first quarter of the new millennium that she never saw, remedy for the Kardashianization of pop culture with banal looks copied bovinely by followers waiting for the next click, Carolyn capable of going beyond the infinite sadness of the fashion of the fake poor as well as the equally desperate fashion of the fake rich, always at ease but always remote, practically a Warholian screenprint in flesh and blood, and now immortal in the photographs of a distant era, the nineties that are back, or perhaps they never passed also thanks to her, the classy class and you can’t buy it online, much less at the Black Friday sales, not now or ever.
Corriere della Sera also on Whatsapp. sufficient click here to subscribe to the channel and always be updated.
December 2, 2023 (modified December 2, 2023 | 09:21)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#Carolyn #Bessette #Kennedy #books #celebrate #American #Lady #time.news