Style Strategy 013: Thoughts on allure and authenticity

How our reactions to Ryan Murphy's Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy says more about us than them.

It was the uproar that could be heard around fashion and pop culture internet.

I know, I know, before you think this is going to be another litany of complaints about how Ryan Murphy did Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy wrong, wait.

I’m much more interested in why we’re reacting the way we are. As the saying goes, it says far more about us than it does about them.

(I will hereafter refer to Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy as CBK, because that’s more fun to type out than Bessette-Kennedy.)

Online commentators quipped that her hair was too blonde, the Birkin bag was the incorrect size and was conspicuously empty, and the clothes entirely wrong. Ryan Murphy has since spoken to Variety, explaining that they were just lighting shots and that he’s learnt from his mistake and now understands the fandom of CBK.¹

But it’s not just about how the maligned actress Sarah Pidgeon wasn’t wearing CBK-approved brands like Yohji Yamamoto, or that she was in fact wearing a wig. Those are cheap shots and easy criticisms.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would have helped, but what was missing here was the imperfections, the realness, the rawness of CBK as an actual person who lived a life and was known to be hilarious, full of life, kind — and wore clothes for her true life, and not for the camera. Sunita Kumar Nair’s book on CBK is excellent; here’s an excerpt.

As

Amy Odell

wrote in her Substack:

This imperfection is what makes her style so appealing. Today, so many of us filter our images and inject our faces, and try to make our clothes perfect in a way that looks performative and homogenous.

Instagram Face

It reminded me of Jia Tolentino’s (in)famous New Yorker article about Instagram Face, which came out SIX YEARS ago. Worth a re-read just to indulge in her razor sharp prose:

It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski).

If this was not the first time that Instagram face was used in widespread media, it definitely was instrumental in solidifying it in our lexicon.

Tweaking ones face through filters and retouching — now not just for professionals but anyone really with apps like FaceTune — and clever makeup tricks learnt through social media tutorials has meant that many faces that we see, famous or not, are converging to look more and more similar. Pillowy lips, high cheekbones. Whether you’re scrolling through Instagram or TikTok or out and about, it’s definitely uncanny valley with a certain Look du jour.

I realise many aspire to Instagram face. But, there’s a blandness in the perfection. (Maybe it’s just me — as I told

Emily Morello

, I’ve never had Botox, filler etc and in certain circles I feel like I’m the exception, not the rule.)

It’s the flattening of beauty via algorithms. While soothing to the eye, it lacks quirks or distinction. Would celebrities from yesteryear that didn’t have Instagram face — like CBK— be considered beautiful?

The search for good taste is a trap

Effortlessness and good taste

CBK signalled taste by not wearing flashy designers — something I’ve written about before. That aura of effortlessness. The elusive quality of “good taste.”

Style Strategy 007: The 'effortless style' paradox

But I’m also aware of the layers that come with this: CBK was thin, tall, blonde, white — conventional markers of beauty and “style” still upheld by society.

As someone who’s Asian and visibly so — I can sense change when rooms I walk into have no other people of colour present — I sometimes wonder if I’m unconsciously conditioned to revere her image. I’m sure it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B — and does that make it okay?

The Japanese aesthetic belief of wabi sabi has a complex meaning; in Western parlance it is broadly is the embrace of imperfection and transience through patina.

In fashion you might see it in Prada’s purposely creased fabrics, or raw hems of Marni and Alber Elbaz’s Lanvin. It gives a sense of it being worn, like a good vintage piece. Many of CBK’s most loved designed sought the beauty in imperfections.

Rei Kawakubo:

“I like it when something is off, not perfect.”

(Another killer quote from her: “Many parts of the media have made a situation where uninteresting fashion can thrive.” What a burn!)

And from Yohji Yamamoto:

“I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.

The Ryan Murphy images of CBK, though test images, lack the rawness. It’s too glossy, the put-together too polished. It lacks soul.

And on Meghan Markle

Just this week I listened to Emma Grede interview Meghan Markle on her podcast.

(Grede is an excellent interviewer. As I wrote in my Substack chat, one could sense her caution in the beginning, but as she became more comfortable she was emboldened to try to steer the interview to ask — very polite, diplomatic versions — of questions many of us were thinking.)

The similarities are clear: she is another woman who married into a high profile family, and someone who had a life before marriage. They are both heavily scrutinised, which even the most neutral party can readily admit.

While I’m neither here-nor-there on Markle, it is fascinating to understand why she incites so much hate. “She pays attention to every appearance, every word, every gesture,” commented a neighbour, Richard Mineards, to the Daily Mail — which ergh, I feel for Markle because that just doesn’t help her cause. Markle gives this air of doing too much, caring too much, trying too hard to be perfect, she’s contrived — it makes people dislike her (I’m aware that there are a host of other reasons too for and against this). The striving for perfection makes us wary and distrusting; she’s trying too hard. (The world doesn’t like strivers, as I wrote about here.) And then I wonder if she would be treated any differently if she was thin, blonde, tall and white. Just putting it out there.

Authenticity

It’s an overused term nowadays. You see it in marketing advice, from content creators talking about how they grew big, from designers on their vision, on founders on how they created the product. “It’s from a place of authenticity,” they say on podcasts.

Put it like this: no one says that their brand is about inauthenticity, do they?

Once when watching a senior editor pack, I was aghast to see her squeeze her leather handbags into her suitcase — without dust bags. I was stunned and tried to stop her. She was the type of editor who only ever wore designer goods, and she laughed at my attempts. Pieces are meant to be worn and used, she reminded me. You can’t be precious with them.

Grede tells Markle that she loves the video of her dancing while pregnant that came out days before the podcast interview occured. “I want to see more of that from you,” she says encouragingly. While my heart goes out to Markle because she is so scrutinised for whatever she does, I’m with Grede — we’re looking for a note of actual ‘authenticity’ from Markle, not one that seems scripted. Understandably Markle has her guard up, but in today’s obsession with authenticity, it’s something that we can sense lacking.

CBK isn’t judged with the same yardstick. She has no social media, and with an untimely, early death, she is enshrined as the patrician blonde beauty married to a young political scion. To do a visual reading of the few existing imagery of CBK, because they are grainy and taken off-the-cuff by hiding paparazzi they read as authentic. Her clothes are worn for her life, and she’s rarely on a red carpet or has link affiliates — nor can we imagine her with them.

Allure not replicas

Even if someone to wear the exact same pieces as CBK, that won’t be a short-cut to the allure of her. It’s more than a sum of her parts — if you want to dress like that, it’s more about capturing the spirit. It’s the detail in the proportion of the collar, how a piece sits on her just so, how it’s worn a certain way.

I’ve occasionally impulse purchased an item after seeing it on a celebrity or influencer, only to realise that it just doesn’t look the same as me. Buying that single piece is going to give me the look I want. You can’t buy the allure. This is why I’m so passionate about how we can’t shop our way to better style, and I started my series about how to develop and evolve personal style, Style Strategy.

Introducing 'Style Strategy' - a series on how to define your taste and personal style

CBK was captured through film imagery, many grainy and being paparazzi images, few where she is looking to camera. The haze of yesteryear has given her image a halo.

Good personal style isn’t about buying that it-item or wearing a certain designer or trying to dress for a shot.

I’ve seen people who wear high street and look like it’s Khaite/<insert cool brand>, and I’ve seen people wear designer and it look like high street.

True, authentic personal style is just that — it says what it is on the label. It’s the convergence of the personal through wearing your clothes with intention and having them fit with your life, and knowing yourself well — your taste, your eye, your perspective.

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1. “In the end, Murphy says he takes full responsibility for deciding to release the camera test images. “If I ever do something like that again, I have to put a warning label on the top of the caption, explaining to people what the process is,” he says. “But I was trying to protect our actors from being absolutely swarmed by the paparazzi. But that’s on me. I made a mistake, and I’ve learned from it.””