How 'Love Story' Makes Us Fall for Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Wedding Dress All Over Again

Early in episode 6 of FX's Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Bessette-Kennedy, the titular CBK confesses something that seems unimaginable to brides around the world. "I never thought about my wedding," Carolyn, played by Sarah Pidgeon, says with a sigh and a tousle of her blonde hair. "Getting married just never seemed as romantic as being married."

No one watching can miss the dramatic irony: The bridal industry often cites the couple's 40-guest wedding at First African Baptist Church in Cumberland Island, Georgia, as one of the romantic ceremonies in modern American history. And Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's custom Narciso Rodriguez wedding dress created an entire class of bridalwear all on its own. "This dress was not a revolutionary move for Carolyn," fashion journalist Sunita Kumar Nair writes in Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy: A Life in Fashion. "The slip dress was already a firm member in her wardrobe club, but it was her decision for it to be her bridal dress that set her apart."

In an era when brides were still fixated on Princess Diana-esque sleeves and Disney princess skirts, the Calvin Klein publicist's understated choice stood out. "Even though the slip dress style was popular for daily wear in the '90s, that style for a wedding dress was not common," stylist Bailey Moon agrees. "I think part of Carolyn's appeal is that she was able to take minimal silhouettes and styles and completely own them." That rule applied even on the biggest day of her life—a moment Love Story captures in its "Wedding" episode.

"I think everybody saw that dress," Rudy Mance, the series' costume designer, tells Marie Claire ahead of the new installment's March 5 premiere. "Despite being a private wedding, it was the most photographed wedding dress of all time, really."

So of all the looks in Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's famed wardrobe that could appear in Love Story, anticipation for the 1996 wedding dress's revival might have been the highest of any single garment made for the series. The backstory is as sentimental as the wedding itself, after all: Bessette-Kennedy chose Rodriguez, a close friend, to design her gown shortly after he left their mutual employer, Calvin Klein, for the design director role at Cerruti. The final gown captures how well he understood her sensibilities as a bride, and as a woman.

"It was such a simple, simple dress and such a simple design, but that was part of the beauty of it," Mance says. "It was so minimalistic and it really did push the boundaries. It really did blow up everyone's notion of what they thought a wedding dress should be."

Given the outsize reaction to Love Story's costumes when test shots surfaced last summer, the pressure to perfect Carolyn's wedding dress couldn't have been higher. Like the actors preparing to inhabit the characters, Mance and his team studied every image they could get their hands on to get the garment right: wedding dress sketches published in Vanity Fair, the handful of photographs that eventually became published, clips resurfaced in the 2019 documentary JFK Jr. and Carolyn's Wedding: The Lost Tapes.

"We watched that and did as many screenshots and stills of her from the side, from the back," Mance says. "I watched how it moved."

Replaying grainy footage can only get a design team so far. But then, Mance says, there was a breakthrough: an assistant specializing in made-to-order and custom builds tracked down the exact store where Rodriguez sourced the fabric for Carolyn's dress, New York City's B&J Fabrics. Better yet, the store could provide the key to mimicking the exact sheen of Bessette-Kennedy's luminous gown.

"They had kept the actual swatch of [the fabric] because it was such a benchmark in pop culture. Of course, it's 30 years later, so it's yellowed and discolored," Mance says. "But through them, we were able to contact the same mill [where] Narciso had gotten the fabric, had it imported from Europe, and so that's what we made the dress out of."

The accessories, too, were sourced from the exact brands Bessette-Kennedy wore, sometimes with her original measurements or pieces as the blueprint. "For the shoes, we went to Manolo Blahnik, and they got us the original pair from their archives," Mance says. For the bridge's gloves and veil, the New York City-based glove manufacturer offered the same bespoke fabric—and "the actual sketch of Carolyn Bessette's hand."

In real life, Bessette-Kennedy and Rodriguez reportedly deliberated between three final versions of the eventual wedding dress. On the show, too, Mance worked with a trio of gowns—but his were crafted out of practicality. One was a prop for a scene where Rodriguez holds up the dress; one was for the bride to be sewn into in her suite; and the final was the gown Pidgeon wore for each take.

Over several fittings and dozens of Lost Tapes re-plays, Mance collaborated with Philadelphia-based couturier Anna Light to fine-tune the dress's fit. "We'd have Sarah walk and she would dance in it, and we would sort of tweak from there," he says. The painstaking process finally ended after midnight—on the night before filming the wedding. "[Light] slept over in New York, and we finished the dress at 2 A.M. Then it went on camera a couple of hours later the next day."

Mance describes the day the wedding was filmed in upstate New York as "magic": seeing the candles lit in the faux chapel, watching Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly twirl around the tent-covered dance floor in a convincing portrayal of lovestruck newlyweds. The wedding scene, he says, captures a feeling the production wanted to bring from start to finish. "It was just as important to the actors and the writers and directors, every single one of us, as much as it was to me, to really pay our respects and try and be as true to who these people were as real people. For me, it was coming through in terms of the clothes."

Today, Moon notes brides can channel CBK's dress with everything from custom wedding gowns by One/Of to off-the-rack options at Net-a-Porter and Mytheresa. The impression it made thirty years ago has lasted. "That's glory of Carolyn's Narciso dress—it's timeless," the stylist says.

And, it only needs a few moments—or a single photo passed around the world—to reassert its impact. In Love Story's final cut, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's take on a fairytale wedding dress is onscreen for a few short minutes. Still, it captures the dress's aura in the moment and in the present, including for the actor wearing it. "It's the best, it's the most beautiful dress in the entire world," Sarah Pidgeon told Marie Claire in her cover story. Slipping it on and wearing it up the re-created aisle, "[I] understand why it's so iconic."