The Internet Has A Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy Problem
What the latest obsession reveals about trends, purchasable aesthetics, and the hard work of actually finding your taste
“I want to be Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, but I like jewellery too much.”
A friend said this to me recently outside a cafe in London, half-laughing yet entirely serious. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, because that one sentence is the entire internet right now, compressed into twelve words. And because you can’t be Carolyn Bessette, but with chunky jewellery.
Love Story came out last month and the internet, predictably, lost its mind. Not just about the series: about Carolyn. About the boatneck white gowns and the cigarette pants and the studied, disciplined blankness of a woman who, depending on who you ask, either understood instinctively that the most powerful thing she could wear was almost nothing - or simply happened to be rich, blonde, thin, and upper-class enough that almost nothing looked like genius. The truth is probably somewhere in between, and also impossible to know. What we do know is that the internet didn’t stop to ask the question. It saw the images, decided she was a style visionary, and got to work.
Within days, TikTok and Instagram were flooded with “CBK core” tutorials and people “channeling Carolyn” in slip dresses and minimalist coordinates. Brands frantically repositioned anything beige, anything vaguely Upper East Side-adjacent - and sometimes simply anything they could - as the CBK aesthetic: the trend you must buy right now. Substack was, of course, not immune.
And then, almost immediately, something funny started happening. Scroll through the posts and you’ll find chunky gold hoops worn with “minimalist” outfits. Shein polyester slip dresses covered in fringing yet somehow described as CBK-inspired. Someone, somewhere, published a roundup of “CBK-style jewelry”. For a woman who famously didn’t wear any.
No matter how interesting, infuriating, or genuinely inspiring this new obsession is, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy isn’t a new aesthetic discovery. She’s quiet luxury with a mythology, a face, and a tragedy attached. Just as the trend seemed to be fading, after flooding our feeds and closets with The Row and Toteme and convincing us that true taste reveals itself through restraint, Love Story just breathed new life into it. The internet didn’t discover a new aesthetic. It found a more romantic story to hang an existing one on. And that story is an extremely effective marketing vehicle.
Which means that, unfortunately - or fortunately, perhaps - dear Emily (fictional name!), wearing a beige cashmere sweater and jeans won’t magically transform you into CBK.
Why You Should Care. On Wanting the Trend Without Doing the Work
The Aesthetic Gap: We Want the Label, Not the Lifestyle
The CBK frenzy reveals something that goes well beyond one woman, one series, or one badly misunderstood capsule wardrobe. It exposes the gap - wide, growing, and mostly unacknowledged - between the aesthetics we claim and the ones we actually live.
We want the cultural cache of having a signature style. The shorthand it provides. The sense of being someone who has figured it out, who has edited, who has a point of view. What we don’t want, is the actual work that requires. And the uncomfortable truth is that CBK’s aesthetic - whatever its origins - isn’t replicable. You can’t buy the restraint, if that’s what it was. You can’t buy the context, the background, the particular kind of upper-class ease that makes almost nothing look like everything. And you certainly can’t buy it on Shein.
That kind of taste is slow. It’s uncomfortable. And it runs completely counter to how we consume identity right now.
So instead, we do what the internet rewards: we adopt the label. We slap “CBK” on whatever we were already doing and call it channeling her. And brands, recognising the gap as the business opportunity it has always been, meet us exactly where we are - offering us the aesthetic in a format we can purchase, no discipline or effort required. Reformation just launched an entire collection to prove the point: satin skirts, cigarette trousers, studied restraint. The label, packaged and priced for checkout.
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Costume vs. Character: Why Borrowing Someone’s Look Isn’t Borrowing Their Taste
CBK is not the first aesthetic to go through this cycle. She won’t be the last.
Think about what happened to every trend that came before: Y2K, old money, cottagecore, and the entire quiet luxury movement that supposedly just died and has now, apparently, been resurrected in slip dress form. Each arrives carrying its own internal logic, its own genuine point of view - a coherent worldview compressed into a set of references, silhouettes, and cultural associations. Each then gets quickly flattened into a set of a Pinterest board, a shopping guide, a TikTok tutorial. The internal logic evaporates. The purchases remain. And six months later, when the algorithm has moved on to the next beautifully photographed identity, everyone quietly abandons the aesthetic they were so certain was finally, completely, irrevocably theirs.
The costume gets mistaken for the character every single time. And every time, without fail, we’re surprised when wearing it doesn’t make us feel like her.
The Taste Problem: Hard Work, No Shortcuts
Developing real taste - the kind that reads as effortless precisely because it’s so deeply internalised - requires something the current cultural moment is structurally designed to prevent: time, and the willingness to be wrong, boring, or maybe even ugly, for a while.
It requires wearing the same silhouette repeatedly until you understand whether it actually works for you, not just for her. It requires trying things that might not work, and sitting with the results long enough to learn something from them. It requires buying less, but experiencing more - a museum, a trip, a person whose style stops you in the street. It requires, in other words, the exact opposite of what algorithms are designed to make you do: slower, more deliberate, more alive to the world around you than to the one on your screen.
We’re not talking about taste in the old, gatekeeping sense - the kind that decided what was proper and who deserved a seat at the table. We’re talking about your taste: the personal, specific, occasionally inexplicable set of things that feel true to you. Finding that takes time, mistakes, and the patience to stay with yourself long enough to find out who that actually is. There are no shortcuts, and no one is selling them, despite what the CBK content would suggest.
This implicates all of us - including the people writing newsletters about it, clearly. The pull of the new aesthetic is strong. Carolyne Bessette-Kennedy’s particular flair was genuinely seductive.
But there’s a difference between finding inspiration in someone’s point of view and simply borrowing their name for whatever you were already doing. Her style was so specific, so thoroughly her own, that it still reads clearly across thirty years, a Netflix series, and an internet determined to misunderstand it. That specificity wasn’t accidental and it wasn’t aesthetic luck.
Statement jewelry on a boring outfit won’t automatically make you interesting. The absolute absence of it won’t make you CBK. And no pre-packaged aesthetic - however beautifully mythologised, however aggressively marketed - will ever be a shortcut to the thing you’re actually looking for. Which is just to look, finally, like yourself.
The trend will die. It always does. Your taste, if you take the time to find it, never will.
Thank you for reading, as always.
And if you’ve enjoyed it - or know someone who needs to hear this - pass it on.
This is a masterwork of an article. It both digs into a current craze and begs you to think about what style really means to you. Absolutely well done, most enjoyable thing I’ve read in a while, and I’m not on the CBK train 👏🏽
This was an important text to write and publish! Thank you.