“No one can ever emulate her to a tee,” Julia Rabinowitsch, vintage sourcer and founder of lifestyle site The Millennial Decorator, says of the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. But Rabinowitsch wants to help us all try: on June 4, she’s dropping a collection of 15 pairs of shoe designs once worn by the Calvin Klein executive and wife of John F. Kennedy Jr.
To clarify: these aren’t the exact items that were physically in Bessette-Kennedy’s possession—but they are the same brand, style, and often year of the ones she owned. Rabinowitsch spent countless hours pouring over old paparazzi photos from the 1990s, as well as Sunita Kumar Nair’s book CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, to identify the specific archival footwear she had in her closet. Then, “It was a good six months of daily searching,” she says. “It was so meticulous because her styles were pretty much the rarest of the rare to look for.”
There are her Carolyne Manolo Blahniks, which she wore to a 1997 ceremony to mark President John F. Kennedy’s birthday. (The name “Carolyne” was not a nod to Bessette-Kennedy, but rather Blahnik’s artist friend Carolyne Roehm.) She also frequently wore black Prada loafers while walking around TriBeCa, perhaps heading to lunch at Bubby’s or dinner at the Tribeca Grill. And then there were the snakeskin Prada kitten heels she often threw on with a pair of cropped blue jeans and a black overcoat. (Rabinowitsch says that she’s “never gotten so many messages” after putting them on her Instagram story, despite not even mentioning their association with Bessette-Kennedy. “People were freaking out—they’re such a unique pair.”)
The trickiest style to track down? Beige Manolo Blahnik Mary Janes with a tiny buckle in front. Rabinowitsch eventually found them via an eBay account, Rabbit Rabbit, that’s solely dedicated to tracking down archival fashion pieces Bessette wore. A pair of Prada boots, meanwhile, came all the way from Japan.
Rabinowitsch has a few other items in the drop that were key wardrobe staples of Bessette-Kennedy: a vintage Cartier Tank Louis and a Prada 1995 Spazzolato leather tote bag, for example. But she really wanted to focus on the shoes: “Everyone tends to look at her holistic outfits—they're all engraved in our mind,” she says. “But no one to my knowledge has really looked ever like her specific shoes and footwear staples.”
And what do they tell us? They certainly cement Bessette-Kennedy’s stature as an icon of ’90s minimalism, with each pair either being black, beige, or a combination of both.
But they also show something else: the deep and necessary practicality of Bessette-Kennedy’s style. She was hounded by paparazzi and struggled to handle all the media attention she received after entering a relationship with John. “At first blush, it seems naive to think Carolyn didn’t know what she was getting into when she married John, but I really don’t think she expected that every day she walked out the front door of their Tribeca apartment, the paparazzi would jump out of cars and scatter out of alleys and up the street like rats to catch her walking from the building to a car waiting out front,” Bessette-Kennedy’s close friend Dan Samson told author Elizabeth Beller for her book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Having shoes that allowed her to navigate quickly through a human swarm of cameras was a safety choice just as much as a style one.
Speaking of the word “style”: Samson also told Beller that his friend “didn’t ask to be a style icon.” But, as this drop shows, even 25 years after her death, her wardrobe remains one of the most emulated in the world as trends like “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth” still dominate shopping habits. “There’s so much interest in this vintage, timeless way of dressing,” says Rabinowitsch. “Carolyn was a perfect embodiment of that.”