Luxe Aeterna
Author Sunita Kumar Nair on her new book, "Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion," and why the willowy wife of John Kennedy Jr. remains a style icon 25 years after their deaths.
Fashion loves its muses. I’ve seen 60s socialites Babe Paley and Marella Agnelli, opera diva Maria Callas, former American first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, actresses Audrey Hepburn and Catherine Deneuve—most especially in her Belle de Jour role as a sexually repressed bourgeois wife—burble forth as inspiration on runways several times over. All were influential during their lifetimes—appearing on the best dressed lists and in glossy magazine spreads—as well as after.
But for the younger generation of fashion designers and creatives, there’s a 1990s style icon who hid from the limelight as much as she could during her brief time on the public stage, and, more than two decades after her death, now reigns as an major influencer: John Kennedy Jr.’s wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.
I wrote a piece a few weeks ago here about how Bessette-Kennedy keeps resurfacing as a cultural and style touchstone. I’ve decided to circle back to the subject by having a chat with fashion creative director Sunita Kumar Nair, author of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, a new book published by Harry N. Abrams that is as beautiful and captivating John and Carolyn Kennedy were.
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