RoseMarie Terenzio has many fond memories of John F. Kennedy Jr.: the green velvet Gucci suit he wore to a company Christmas party; how he’d run Kiehl’s Silk Groom through his enviable mane and toss on a hat to flatten his hair; or the way, if designers sent him suits or ties, he’d often gift them to guys in the office.
“He liked to look nice and dress nice,” says Terenzio, who was Kennedy Jr.’s assistant from 1994 until his death in 1999 and the author of JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography. “He liked nice suits, but he wasn’t someone who needed 20. He always felt like if he had some sort of privilege, he would share it.”
JFK Jr. is back in the spotlight, some 27 years after his and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s tragic deaths, thanks to the Ryan Murphy-produced FX series Love Story, the most-watched limited series on Hulu and Disney+ to date, which concluded its eight-episode run last night. While Bessette Kennedy—or CBK, as she is often called—is Love Story an enduring fashion touchstone, the show has sparked a fevered interest among young menswear enthusiasts thanks to Paul Anthony Kelly’s fictionalized John-John, who mesmerized audiences with his eclectic sartorial approach as he biked his way across a quixotic, pre-digital 1990s Manhattan.
Not since Mad Men has a TV show so swiftly, and dramatically, reinvigorated the way American men want to dress. The AMC show, which ran from 2007 to 2014, was a slow burn of staid, mid-century corporate tailoring that dovetailed perfectly with what was going on in the fashion sphere in the late aughts—from Thom Browne’s truncated tailoring to Scott Sternberg’s wildly popular Band of Outsiders and its off-kilter take on prep, to Frank Muytjens, then-head of J.Crew men’s design, introducing the brand’s sleek, slimmed-down Ludlow suit (fun fact: Todd Snyder was instrumental to the cut). The menswear sensation of Mad Men swept away the hipster posturing that came before, the American Apparel deep V-necks and Hedi Slimane rocker jeans, and guys suddenly wanted to dress like grown-ups again. “And then men started drinking a little bit of whiskey,” quips Rachel Tashjian, senior style reporter at CNN, who often covered JFK Jr. and CBK’s sartorial legacies during her past tenure as GQ’s fashion critic.
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