008 An intimate relationship with her drycleaner
008 An intimate relationship with her drycleaner
On looking rich, bad taste is better than no taste, the unknown factor of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.
Books
I’m re-reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy and have dog-eared so many pages (never loan me a book!).
In describing them and the main character of Faye, who people tell things to, Judith Thurman wrote in The New Yorker, “She lends herself as a filter.”
People tell her their stories and they touch on all of things that connect us as people.
I also took a photo of this line, said by a woman who has been left by her husband and lost her own sense of self because he imposed so much of his own onto her. “He is a man of very good taste, which for me has been a form of torture.”
I’m a big fan of re-reading because each time your perspective has shifted, you’re not the same person, you pick up on different things.
I also started reading Ruth Reichl’s Paris Novel, which I know I will love because for one, it’s about a young woman who goes to Paris, one of my favourite genres (I wrote this piece 13 years ago, I’ve always liked what I’ve liked!). The best is The Dud Avocado. And two, it has a blurb by Nigella Lawson on the front and I adore Nigella.
I’ve also bought the new Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy biography. Obviously I’m as obsessed with Bessette-Kennedy as any other fashion loving woman! When I interviewed Lauren Santo-Domingo, another woman of unimpeachable chic, she told me how Bessette Kennedy lived in her suburb and was just a couple of years older than her and was a bit wild and irreverent and like the coolest girl on earth. She said in high school she was so obsessed with her she once caught the bus to Canal Street in New York where supposedly Bessette-Kennedy bought a specific Patchouli perfume from a street vendor so she could buy it too. She said Bessette-Kennedy always that ‘it factor.’
Part of her it factor though is that she’s kind of a mystery. Just as Phoebe Philo said, not being on google is the chicest thing! Bessette-Kennedy was super private, barely gave interviews and of course her life was cut so tragically short. All we have are the same paparazzi and gala photos that we’ve pored over and mined for clues as to how to have personal style, how to have it.
As The Washington Post’s former fashion editor and critic at large Robin Givhan wrote of Bessette Kennedy and her husband in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of their death: “The couple died before the era of Instagram and Twitter, back when personal lives were something that people still sought to protect rather than curate and then monetise. The couple died when discretion was admirable, before it became quaint and then vaguely obsolete.”
Discretion is even chicer now because it’s such a rare commodity.
When I interviewed Sunita Kumar Nair last year who wrote the book CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life In Fashion, the first book - astoundingly - to chart her style, respecting her privacy, was something she considered deeply.
“Carolyn was a super-private person and I wanted to maintain that, and hear how she chose to present her persona through her clothes, that is what CBK: A Life in Fashion is about. It’s a chance for the fashion world to decipher what she stood for from a fashion perspective. Carolyn wanted to remain mysterious and that is the most important thing she managed to maintain.”
Still, of course, I will read the biography, and keep trying to master her characterful, meaningful minimalism. It’s been variously described as“effortful effortlessness” and “throwaway chic”, and she was far more avant garde than she is really given credit for - all that Yohji and Prada. She was no basic beige girl! But we will never really know her. So many of us now, especially - ahem, elder millennials - are reconsidering how much of ourselves we share online, the cost of performing your life, the flattening of our tastes and interests and personal style thanks to the endless scroll. We will never know if Bessette-Kennedy would have done a #grwm if she was alive today, but I doubt it. As someone chronically incapable of mystery and who wears her heart on her sleeve, I’ll always admire Bessette-Kennedy’s element of unknowing. And I will always be trying to recreate that perfect Yohji black skirt and white shirt moment.
& nice things
It’s fashion month and you can’t avoid the politics of it all - context is everything.
I found this quote from the New York Magazine The Critics newsletter about a review of The Roommate, currently playing on Broadway, as relevant to fashion as it is to the arts.
“It feels like a play that somebody might describe as personal, not political, although those things are never unattached. You can’t shut a story inside the walls of a house anymore and go ‘all we care about is the arc of this woman.’ We’ve become attuned to questions of how a character sits inside of politics. It’s automatic now in a way it didn’t used to be.”
This is the review.
A masterclass in looking expensive
I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures'.’ Pleasure is pleasure! And usually it’s ascribed to things that women like doing or reminds me of when there’s cake in the office and everybody goes on about how it’s so naughty to have some!
So my pleasure this week has been The Perfect Couple, which I binged so satisfactorily. In part because, as Raven Smith put it in Vogue, it’s kind of unsatisfactory.
As Smith writes, “On the whole the show is a moreish-ly watchable, nearly there drama. The material doesn’t feel quite good enough for the actors, but it’s certainly not beneath them.”
How could a show about kill-someone-and-get-away-with-it-rich people on Nantucket not be moreish-ly watchable! I’ve never craved a Tanqueray so intensely.
The cast is phenomenal - Nicole Kidman as another terrifying rich blonde, Liev Schreiber, (imagine doing sex scenes with your best friend’s ex-husband though?!) Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson, Meagan Fahy - and the plausibility is thin! Who cares?
Kidman is really carving out a niche for this particular kind of woman, and that is, a woman who knows her dry cleaner intimately. Well not intimately, but then again on this show who knows!
As the show’s costume designer Signe Sejlund told WWD, Greer Garrison Winbury, matriarch of one of Nantucket’s richest families, wears most ice blues and shades of cream. The kind of creams only available to the truly wealthy.
“The more cream colours she could wear, the more complicated it is to stay clean. And that’s a way to show how you don’t have to care about whether you get spots on your clothes or whatever,” Sejlund says. “She might pretend that she’s cleaning the kitchen, but she’s not really. There’s housekeepers and gardeners and pool boys and there’s girls. That’s like people taking care of the whole thing.”
Other fashion tells in the show? The particular shade of ‘Nantucket red’ that Eve Hewson’s character, who is marrying into the Winbury clan - and a new social stratosphere she’s not comfortable in - gets wrong.
I also laughed at Dakota Fanning’s character scanning the room full of eager fans at Greer’s book launch (she’s kind of like the Stephen King of Nantucket) and proclaiming it looked like “Lily Pulitzer threw up in here.”
Anyway, to look expensive this summer I’m going to buy these A-Emery trousers. I’ve been looking for a new bias cut pair of trousers to replace my loved-out Christopher Esber ones. I plan to coolly swan about in them, Tanqueray and tonic in hand.
What we lose, and gain, in personal style
One of my fashion journalist icons Carthy Horyn wrote this piece on losing, and finding her personal style that I’ve been thinking about all week.
What do we lose when we reject clothes as a means of personal expression? When we, as Horyn puts it, “self-erase?”
What do we gain though, when we find our own style?
For Horyn, it turned out to be transcendent. She found it in a bespoke suit. It freed her from ‘fashion,’ in a way, because it connected - and also disconnected - her from all of her past selves. It’s something we can all hope for!
“So in a sense, I’ve been liberated from fashion. In my suit, I can go back to travelling light and look elegant anywhere in the world. That reaction strikes me as mundane, though. The truth is I will always be a sucker for fashion. But in the suit, despite or because of all its history, I have the feeling of being unanchored to my age. That is, finally, the difference. The weightlessness.”
Bad tastes beats no taste
Are you also obsessed with Addison Rae at the VMAS? I love that she and her stylist, Dara, had one rule about the look “It’s only sexy if it’s freaky.”
Yes! Give us freaky and friction and experimental!
Give me bad taste over no taste any day (Pablo Picasso, noted hater of ‘good taste’ would have loved the VMAs).
My friend Ben and I had the most fun all-day exchange on Instagram last Thursday.
It started with this The Cut article about how brands are wooing the top 2 per cent of clients that drive 40 per cent of luxury sales.
Ben said that if he had that kind of money he’d still like to have the taste of a 65 year-old Italian barber. Can’t you just picture him? And then we chatted about how fashion works best from the ground up and then we played, all day, which people have both taste and style and who has just one and who has none. The beauty of it is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have one or you don’t have either. It’s subjective anyway and all of it is better than no style!
For the record (the publishable ones):
King Charles - taste and style
Diana Vreeland - taste and style
John F Kennedy Jr - style and taste and bonus category sex appeal (we added swagger for Cate Blanchett also)
He also reminded me of this perfect insult: “she doesn’t have the range.”
It’s almost as good as this:
Ovaries: Talk About Them
It’s nine years today since my sister died of Ovarian cancer. In her last days we all sat with her and held her hands, her feet, she was never ready to go. Of course she wasn’t!
For my sister, for all the families who didn’t get enough time, we can support Camilla and Marc’s Ovaries, Talk About Them campaign, which is funding research into a much-needed early detection test.
The tees are super cute. I wish my sister had met my two beautiful children. They would have lit up her life.
Summer quests
I’ve found the perfect summer piece for when you want to look polished and unflappable! This tuxedo vest from Maggie Marilyn is going to be my most worn item, because I’ve realised I feel best with a bit of structure.
Remember that Ted Talk years ago about ‘power poses’? I still do my own version of them ahead of big interviews, public speaking etc, and I feel like I want to find more pieces that give me the feeling of a power pose.
Love,
Annie xx
Pleasure is pleasure and perspectives shift. 🙌🏻🤤