'An exercise in consumption'

CBK oil

When I was researching anti-Rothschild discourse of 1840s France, I never imagined this would be relevant to 2020s news cycles, but there it is. My column for The CJN is about the whole Gaby Del Valle retweet / David Klion defense drama.

Speaking of dynasties, I was rendered so speechless by Cartoons Hate Her’s satirical yet genuinely inspo guide to alternatives to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy for 1990s style that I thought this truly was the last word on all things CBK. (I’m a Geraldo with a twist of Thatcher.) But while I have not watched and probably won’t watch the biopic show, I am (if posts going back to 2023—oops, 2014—are any guide) not immune to the CBK allure.

This is how I found myself (and now you find yourself; gift link) sucked into Alisha Haridasani Gupta’s NYT story about CBK’s wardrobe, some of which is now being auctioned. (If it ain’t $50 CAD on Poshmark I’m not buying but, noted.) It is chock-full of the usual clichés about this woman, about stylish women generally, in paraphrase and quote and body of text, and it is just so the thing. I feel bad being as amused by it as I am, because this woman died young, but it is also not CBK herself I’m laughing at, but rather the manner in which she’s being posthumously revered.

It’s hard to explain what’s so funny about the article. For example: Did you know that CBK “loved fashion but was never obsessed with chasing trends”? I have no idea what this means, how we are distinguishing these two things, which are rather obviously one and the same. But it sounds noble.

Then there is CBK’s restrained approach to shopping, one that is reminding me of when Edina says she’s going to do a fast, but not a usual sort of fast, and Saffy refers to it as “an eating a lot sort of fast.” CBK and her pals went to I don’t know Century 21 or Loehmann’s or a sample sale or maybe for them “bargain” meant Banana Republic I wish I knew, and she was just different:

“Her friends have mentioned that they would go bargain shopping with her, and they would come back with like three or four bags, and she would come back with one,” said Sunita Kumar Nair, author of “CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion,” who served as a fashion consultant on the FX show.

Slightly smaller hauls, but, hauls. Amazing.

Then there’s the specifics of what’s now being auctioned. Basic capsule wardrobe stuff, evidently, which is also groundbreaking:

“There are coats, pencil skirts and shift dresses and, in contrast to other auctions of celebrity wardrobes, a noticeable absence of statement ball gowns or flashy jewels.”

I want to know whose wardrobe this is describing. There’s a low-key celebrity wardrobe sale trend, and then a Gwyneth Paltrow auction that’s partly for charity and does include, yes, gowns, but also some normal clothes, some estimated to go for similar amounts of money as one could spend on similar used clothes of non-famous people. (An estimated $100-200 US for a Dolce and Gabbana wool suit!) I want RECEIPTS that there is something remarkable happening here.

In the name of research, I have visited the page where this disappointingly online-only auction is happening. Yeah it’s a lot of expensive designer clothing, sold presumably for the sellers to make money off of, which, fair. Just because the late CBK was wealthy does not mean anyone who’s found themselves owning a bit of her garb is so loaded that any income ought to go to charity. If I owned an unexciting, wrong-proportions-for-2026 camel coat once worn by CBK, a less-glamorous version of ones currently in Aritzia, I too would be intrigued by a way to exchange that item for thousands of dollars.

But what the NYT piece dwells on is not so much which clothes CBK selected, but that she was SELECTIVE. As opposed to those other women who simply enter a shop, lift the floorboards, and tilt the contents into a giant shopping cart. CBK did not, unlike the rest of womankind, simply purchase the full racks of every store she entered, but rather selected individual items that suited her.

It was this passage that put me furthest over the edge:

“When you went shopping with her, it wasn’t an exercise in consumption,” Ms. Terenzio said, explaining that Ms. Bessette Kennedy was very selective in what she purchased. “If we went to Prada, she would buy like, a cardigan and maybe a skirt, that was it. And she could mix and match those things with other things in her wardrobe.”

In what sense in what SENSE is shopping at Prada not “an exercise in consumption”??? What kind of medal is merited for ‘only bought two things at Prada’? Not that CBK herself was asking for this, but I’m just not sure what point is even being made. She did extremely normal rich-woman shopping, and this is being discussed in breathless terms.

It’s more than silly, though. It’s annoying because it’s one of those non-shopping as prompt for shopping things. Can we just be honest about what’s happening here? A good-looking woman who worked in fashion and enjoyed clothes-shopping had some nice clothing, much of which has cycled back into (and, with some of the quiet luxury beige, back out of) fashion.

I have no holistic desire to dress like this woman who looked nothing like me. For me the CBK appeal really is about one outfit, or rather, one silhouette: the slip dress. She got married in September 1996 in a Narciso Rodriguez dress worth $40,000 USD of 1996 which I take to be literally incalculable in 2026 Canadian dollars. This yes much-hyped dress must have wedged itself in my mind at some formative age (I’d have been starting 8th grade at the time) as what a wedding dress should look like. I misremembered it as a different style of slip dress, though, more actual slip than minimalist gown. I saw a dress like this in white or off-white in a Paris consignment shop (I was in grad school in Paris at the time) and did not buy this and then went back and they didn’t have it anymore so I got married in a different-style dress but you know what? There is no law against buying dresses once you’re married.

I now have a pale pink such dress from some Canadian silk-slip shop (a while ago, don’t remember which) and, thanks to the buying-black-clothes-online rule, another in that shade that is Equipment via Poshmark.

CBK herself definitely paired her black slipdress with colorful Korean gift shop socks and wool slippers. I also tried on the one on the left but it is somehow too sheer for a photo but not too sheer to wear outside in summer.

This has now sent me down a rabbit hole of slip dressing. 1995 Calvin Klein would appear to have been peak times for the look, which tracks with CBK having worked at the brand at that time. 1994, also decent. Later 1990s versions are overthought, simply spaghetti-strap dresses (like the Betsey Johnson ones I wore to junior and senior prom in 2000 and 2001, respectively) while early-1990s was too grunge-inflected.

Objectively I know that the minimalist slip dress is a look meant for showcasing natural beauty, for if you’re so spectacular that you’re not using your clothes to distract from any facial or bodily imperfections. But also, I like these dresses.