The costume designer for Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, the immensely talented Rudy Mance, faced a number of significant challenges when it came to outfitting one of the most stylish women of all time, as played by the luminous Sarah Pidgeon. How would he track down all of the glorious ’90s pieces that formed the backbone of CBK’s enviable wardrobe? How would he dress her for the years before she became famous and endlessly photographed? (Answer: in a wealth of vintage Calvin Klein.) How would he style her for her most private off-duty moments? And, most importantly, how on earth would he recreate her wedding dress?
The white silk, sleeveless, bias-cut Narciso Rodriguez slip that Carolyn wore to her intimate 1996 wedding to John on Georgia’s Cumberland Island is almost as legendary as she is—sleek, minimal, and easy; a true reflection of her everyday style. In the handful of photos that exist from the ceremony, you can see the dress’s cowl-neck detailing, as well as the care she took with her styling and accessories—a casual up-do, sheer white gloves, a tulle veil, crystal Manolo Blahniks, and a bouquet of lilies of the valley.
Mance, naturally, studied these images closely. “It was really important for me to nail that dress for many reasons,” he tells Vogue, as the show’s sixth episode, “The Wedding,” finally hits screens. “It’s one of the most iconic dresses to have ever been created and photographed. So, I wanted to pay my respects to her, but also to Narciso. He did such an incredible job.”
Beyond the photos, most helpful was a set of Rodriguez’s sketches that Mance and his team discovered in Vanity Fair, which showed both the wedding dress and Carolyn’s rehearsal dinner dress. “So, we used those as a guide to custom-make both of those dresses,” continues Mance.
Then, it was about finding the right fabric for the wedding dress. “I wanted to use silk crêpe like Narciso had. Our research then led us to this great fabric shop in New York that’s still around called B&J Fabrics. They asked, ‘What’re you working on?’ and when we told them, they were like, ‘Oh, well, Narciso got the actual fabric for the wedding dress from us.’ And they still had the swatch! It was tiny and yellowing after 30 odd years, but they had it.” Through B&J Fabrics, Mance and his colleagues were able to contact the mill in Europe that had made that silk crêpe, and get exactly the same fabric shipped over to the US.
There were four or five fittings, remembers Mance, to ensure the dress looked perfect on Sarah, that it was finished to the highest standard, and that it resembled Carolyn’s as closely as possible. “I found a couturier out of Philadelphia named Anna Light who would travel into New York on the train,” he explains. “We’d do fittings and then she’d go away and work on it. The dress was completed the morning of the day we began filming the wedding episode. Anna stayed up the night before and finished it at 2 a.m.” Fitting, given that Rodriguez himself worked on Carolyn’s dress until the very last minute, even carrying out adjustments just before the ceremony, which delayed the event by about two hours.
As for the other details? The shoes in the scene “were from Manolo’s archives—the same shoes Carolyn wore. And her glove maker is still in New York, so we went to them and I actually got to see tracings of her hands that they did when making the original gloves. So they recreated the same exact pair of gloves for us, and also the matching veil.”
But the work, of course, didn’t end there. Carolyn’s rehearsal dinner dress—another Narciso Rodriguez slip, this time in a bias-cut tank-dress style and nude-colored, with crystal embellishment across it—also posed a conundrum. Compared to the wedding dress, there were even fewer photos of it, and, while the aforementioned sketch was illuminating, the team needed a little more to go on. Luckily, one of Mance’s design assistants was somehow able to track down a photo of a model wearing the same dress from the back, which was crucial to constructing that side of it.
It’s clear that all this detective work was more than worth it—its result is a sartorial high point in a show which has already been stuffed full of them.
