How ‘Love Story’ Mimicked Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s Wedding Dress’

For a wedding that was originally intended to be as private as possible, photos (and some low-resolution camcorder videos) from Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr.’s intimate Cumberland Island.

Of all Bessette Kennedy’s historic fashion choices (of which there are too many to mention: evening wear by Yohji Yamamoto, sunglasses by Selima Salaun, that camel-colored Prada coat that recently sold for $192,000…), the ensemble that will go down in history as her most iconic is, without a doubt, her wedding look: a bias-cut silk slip dress with draped neckline, designed by her Calvin Klein colleague and confidante Narciso Rodriguez, who changed the bridal industry it was known in the ’90s.

“Part of the magic of it was that it was so simple,” says “Love Story” costume designer Rudy Mance. “But the way it hung around her, and the way it fell… I knew it had to be as exact as possible.”

And while as precise as possible might have been Mance’s ethos for the entirety of the Ryan Murphy-produced FX anthology series’ costumes, when it came to recreating Bessette Kennedy’s (played by Sarah Pidgeon) dress for Episode 6 (aka “The Wedding”), he knew it had to be absolutely perfect — along with all the other details of the day.

To make sure this was the case, Mance searched through all the photos and coverage of the wedding he could find. “JFK Jr. and Carolyn’s Wedding: The Lost Tapes,” a 2019 documentary featuring archival footage of the couple’s rehearsal dinner, ceremony and reception, was particularly helpful: “My team and I probably watched that a hundred times,” says Mance.

Both Pidgeon’s rehearsal and ceremony dresses were completely custom designed (Mance worked with a Philadelphia couturier to bring the looks to life). In the case of the former, this took a little more detective work – although the champagne-coloured, mid-length dress, also designed by Rodriguez, was iconic in its own right, it was photographed much less, giving Mance more room for interpretation.

“I knew there was some shine and luster in it, and there were definitely beads in it. But I could never tell exactly what kind of beads they were,” Mance explains. To create Pidgeon’s finished look, Mance ended up combining two dresses: a champagne-colored slip lining with a sheer, beaded dress. “We hand sewed the two dresses together while she was still wearing hers, and then we said, ‘Okay, now let’s get started!’”

For the ceremony dress, Mance studied “The Lost Tapes” to “see how it moved and how it fell when she danced, when she walked, how it kicked out.” The dress Pidgeon is wearing is as accurate a replica as possible, even down to the fabric, which is the exact same material Rodriguez used when he designed the original. One of Mance’s assistants came across it while researching and swatching possible options at B&J Fabrics in New York. While they were there, the owner told them that the designer had purchased the fabric there thirty years earlier. “Now of course it’s so old, yellowed and discolored, but he had the original steel,” says Mance. Through B&J, Mance and his team were able to have the fabric shipped from the manufacturer’s factory in Italy, which they then used to create the fabric you see on screen in “Love Story.”

The tulle veil, sheer elbow gloves, and Manolo Blahnik shoes that Pidgeon wears as he walks down the aisle are also all authentic. Mance took the heels out of their archives. He also had the veil and gloves remade by the same company that first produced them.

However, not every moment of the episode called for historically accurate recreation.

Bessett Kennedy’s more private moments before the ceremony allowed Mance to take some “creative liberties,” as he describes it. While getting ready at the Greyfield Inn (where the wedding reception was held and guests stayed), the costume designer dressed Pidgeon in a vintage Calvin Klein slip dress, a subtle tribute to Bessett Kennedy’s days at the company. “It felt romantic, right and real,” he says.

In another scene, Pidgeon wraps herself in a bathrobe while smoking a cigarette in the hotel bathtub. Blink and you’ll miss it, but the decal on it is the inn’s authentic logo from 1996. “Somehow my brilliant team found one in the middle of nowhere on eBay,” says Mance. “We got it, but it wasn’t in good condition, so we recreated the robe, but we based it on a guest robe from that era.”

From start to finish, it took Mance and his assistants more than three weeks to dress up Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly (who plays JFK Jr.) for the wedding, with sourcing for the rest of the guests starting even earlier. And while Mance has said that dressing Kelly for the couple’s infamous public fight scene was JFK Jr.’s most difficult look. was to get right, Bessette Kennedy’s was without a doubt the wedding dress. “It may be one of the most iconic and most photographed wedding dresses of all time,” says Mance. “I just wanted to work in silence and pay my respects [Rodriguez]do him and his wonderful work justice.”

But for Mance, his favorite part of the episode, even more than seeing the dresses come to life, was watching the entire wedding “crash together” and be immortalized on screen. Just like in real life (Bessette Kennedy was famously late to her ceremony after needing last-minute wardrobe changes), the crew ran behind on set, meaning they had very little time to photograph the entire candlelit wedding ceremony before the sun disappeared.

“It was super hot that day. We were filming in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. They had built this beautiful church and it had rained two or three days earlier, so it was super swampy and muddy, which of course made me worried because she was wearing this dress,” says Mance. “And then she literally rolled into the Jeep, and we shot it, and then, 20 minutes later… It was just movie magic.”