EDITOR’S NOTE: Delving into the archives of pop culture history, “Remember When?” is a CNN Style series offering a nostalgic look at the celebrity outfits that defined their eras. Watch the three-part CNN Original Series “American Prince: JFK Jr.” premiering August 9 at 9 p.m, ET/PT and running the following two Saturday nights.
In 1996, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. got married outside a peeling white log cabin chapel on Cumberland Island, Georgia. With no paparazzi and no media present, it offered the pair a brief moment of normality before they re-emerged into the world as one of the most famous couples on the planet.
Despite often being referred to as American royalty, Bessette-Kennedy didn’t arrive to their big day in a frothy princess gown. Instead, she used the moment to set her own sartorial standard — by wearing a dress that upended traditional bridal trends and would continue to inspire for decades to come.
Her simple white slip dress was made from silk and cut on the bias, with a scooping cowl neck as its only flourish. The look was finished with a silk tulle veil, crystal beaded Manolo Blahnik satin sandals and a pair of sheer elbow gloves. Her gown was designed by her friend, the fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez. To some, the decision was surprising. Bessette-Kennedy was a prominent publicist at Calvin Klein and an unofficial face of the brand on the New York circuit. And if Klein wasn’t to design her gown, others wondered if it would be a rising star like John Galliano — a master of bias-cut slip dresses and then-creative director at Dior. “For some reason she chose Narciso,” the author of “CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion,” Sunita Kumar Nair said in a phone interview. “I think the fact that she chose an unknown friend, as opposed to Calvin Klein, is just her all along: Championing her friends and wanting them to enjoy her new limelight.”
Rodriguez was recruited to the task over drinks at The Odeon, a restaurant in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York City. It took him three months to design three versions of the wedding dress, which Bessette-Kennedy picked from. In an interview with the New York Times in 1996, Rodriguez called the final dress “sensuous” — a direction he said he and Bessette-Kennedy were aligned on from the beginning. The dress, which Rodriguez ended up gifting, was reportedly worth around $40,000 at the time. “I made that wedding dress with so much love for the person that I loved most in the whole world,” the designer told PBS in 2020. “I never viewed it as a press event.”
The understated, timeless column dress was fit for a small, laid-back wedding. But its simplicity soon sent reverberations through the wider bridal industry. “There was a massive boom in this kind of very sleek silhouette,” said Nair. “Everybody was like, ‘I want to look like her.’ Gone with the meringues.”
Not long before, Janet Jackson had married fellow singer James DeBarge in a jacquard wedding gown with a full tiered skirt. Madonna’s first wedding dress in 1985 featured several layers of gathered tulle, while in 1992 former First Lady Michelle Obama opted for a trailing floor-length duchess satin gown and dramatic sweetheart neckline. But it was the royal union of Princess Diana and then Prince Charles in 1981 that became the yardstick for wedding glamour. Diana’s gown was defined by its many layers of opulence, from the bow-trimmed puffed sleeves to a 25-foot-long veil, which was hand-embellished with 10,000 micro pearls.
Even in the ‘90s, many still looked to Diana’s nuptials for fashion inspiration — including Mariah Carey, whose 1993 satin Vera Wang gown was modeled after the seminal dress — but Bessette-Kennedy wasn’t one of them. “It’s interesting to think about Princess Diana, that was the wedding dress of the 20th century,” Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic at the Washington Post, told CNN. “It was this woman coming out of this fairytale horse and carriage in an enormous, richly embellished dress that was all about indulging fantasy and fairytales of royal life.” By contrast, Bessette-Kennedy, whose marriage to JFK Jr. placed her firmly in America’s political dynasty, made sure her gown had “no embellishment, no ruffles, nothing,” she said.
“She’s sort of saying, rather than embodying some past fantasy or fairytale fulfillment, ‘I am going to do a clean slate, and look forward to the future,’” Tashjian added. “It was the biggest indicator Carolyn gave of what was to come for the global public as the new Mrs. Kennedy,” agreed Nair. “Apparently Princess Diana was very jealous of that wedding.”
Ironically, Bessette-Kennedy’s trend-rebuking dress became the blueprint for brides all over the world. Today, simple ivory slip dresses remain a popular style and are sold everywhere from Victoria Beckham and Max Mara to Reformation and Rixo.
Alexandra Macon, a wedding editor at Vogue, said she “very often” sees women reference the Narciso Rodriguez gown. “When writing a wedding feature, it’s not uncommon for a bride to tell me she emulated Carolyn’s bridal look,” Macon wrote in an email to CNN. Even Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, was besotted with the dress. Just a few months before she met Prince Harry in 2016 (and experienced the tumult of joining a pre-existing dynasty first-hand) Markle told online women’s magazine Glamour her “favorite celebrity wedding dress” was none other than Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s.
“Carolyn’s was just done to absolute perfection,” said Nair. “Thats why we’re talking about it today, 25 years on.”
