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

For a wedding 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, Georgia nuptials are as ubiquitous among brides of today as they were when the couple first tied the knot in 1996. 

Among all of Bessette Kennedy’s history-making fashion choices (of which there are too many to name: Yohji Yamamoto evening wear, Selima Salaun sunglasses, that camel Prada coat that recently sold for $192,000…), the ensemble that has gone down as her most iconic is, without argue, her wedding look: a bias cut, cowl neck, silk slip dress designed by her Calvin Klein colleague-turned-confidant Narciso Rodriguez that changed the bridal industry as 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 that it hung on her, and the way that it draped… I knew it had to be as exact as possible.”  

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

To ensure this was the case, Mance combed through all the photographs and coverage related to the nuptials 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 especially useful: “My team and I watched that probably 100 times,” says Mance. 

Both Pidgeon’s rehearsal and ceremony dresses were entirely custom-designed (Mance worked with a Philadelphia-based couturier to bring the looks to life). In the case of the former, this took a little more sleuthing — while iconic in its own right, the champagne, mid-length, also Rodriguez-designed dress was far less photographed, giving Mance more room for interpretation. 

“I knew it had some shimmer and some shine to it, and it was definitely beaded. But I couldn’t ever tell exactly what kind of beading it was,” explained Mance. To create the finished look Pidgeon dons, Mance ended up combining two dresses: a champagne slip lining with a sheer beaded dress on top. “We hand sewed the two dresses together while it was on her, and then we we said, ‘All right, now go to set!’”  

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 gown Pidgeon wears is as exact a replica as possible, even down to the fabric, which is the very same material Rodriguez used when he designed the original — one of Mance’s assistants stumbled upon it while sourcing and swatching potential options at B&J Fabrics in New York. While there, the owner told them that the designer had actually bought the fabric there 30 years earlier. “Now of course it’s so old, it’s yellowed and discolored, but he had the original swatch,” says Mance. Through B&J, Mance and his team were able to get the fabric shipped from the manufacturer’s mill in Italy, which they then used to create the one you see on screen in “Love Story.”

The tulle veil, sheer elbow gloves and Manolo Blahnik shoes Pidgeon wears while walking down the aisle are all authentic, too. Mance pulled the heels from their archive. He also had the veil and gloves remade by the same company that first produced them. 

Not every moment of the episode called for historically-accurate recreation, though.

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

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

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

But for Mance, more so than seeing the dresses come to life, his favorite part of the episode was watching the entire wedding “crash together” and become immortalized on screen. Just as in real life (Bessette Kennedy was famously late to her ceremony after needing last-minute dress alterations), the crew was running behind on set, meaning they had very limited time to shoot the entire candle-lit wedding ceremony before the sun disappeared. 

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