The ’90s Are in Full Swing—But Is It the End of New Ideas?

“Ever since Love Story dropped,” declared content-creator Monica de La Villardière on Instagram last month, “there’s this one question that keeps coming up: were the ’90s in New York really that great?”

Now, before we proceed, dear reader, I have a confession to make: I have not (yet) completed my required viewing of all nine episodes of Love Story – a fashion felony, on all counts. But what’s likely more felonious is that I also feel curiously reluctant to do so – I am presently on Episode 6 (The Wedding). I fear that my 10,000 hours of Carolyn Bessette internet discourse have, in fact, ruined the show for me to the point that I may not continue. 

And this is not to say that I have something against the woman herself, the actor Sarah Pidgeon who plays the titular love interest, or even showrunner Connor Hines (NOT Ryan Murphy, note, who’s the executive producer). 

If anything, I’ve been a (relatively) longtime (re: 2 years) fan of Bessette Kennedy’s – at least long before Buzzfeed was “definitively” ranking her 20 best outfits. I’ve done my required reading of Elizabeth Beller’s Once Upon a Time (the source material for Love Story), powered through Sunita Kumar Nair’s CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion, and voraciously consumed every style guide that dispenses C.O. Bigelow headbands and straight-leg denim as the secret to wardrobe nirvana.

So, consider this article, dear reader, a dignified retreat from internet fashion discourse, “just in time,” as Philip Seymour Hoffman famously laments in Almost Famous, “for the death rattle. Last gasp. Last grope” of new ideas.

Until, of course, we move onto greener pastures (The Devil Wears Prada 2).

The Cult of Carolyn

“The arc of [Carolyn] is this cool-girl whose edges got softened or rounded after marrying a Kennedy,” opines Lauren Garroni of the Every Outfit podcast. Co-host Chelsea Fairless helpfully adds, “It’s just like a lot of lip-biting and being upset about the paparazzi.”

And it’s true that, in many ways, Carolyn embodied – even defined – the ’90s it-girl archetype, one who’s adjacent to the attention (but never the center), envied by the models, befriended by the misfits, and outright replicated by the rest of us. “They are pure zeitgeist, charisma incarnate, hard to describe linguistically,” writes Raven Smith for Vogue, concluding “when it comes to It girls, men want her, women want to be her, gays want to meme her.”

Now, like all the Its that came before, Carolyn had innate taste, “not so much effortless as entrenched,” Smith goes on, “and taste is female currency, traded in clothes and interiors and locations for mini breaks.”

But It is also a currency that’s volatile – contingent on the times we’re living through. It’s a label Chloë Sevigny now “can’t shake”, one that Hari Nef calls “ineffable”, one that you could technically expand to include the likes of Kendall Jenner and Alex Consani, who go on to attract kult-like followings in the present day.

Yet, what makes her style – and by extension, her persona – feel all the more out of reach (and therefore, hot media property) is the decade itself. 

The Reference in the Room

About a year-and-a-half ago, when I called that personal style was on its deathbed, one of our dear commenters speculated, “Maybe people should get off of Instagram and wear what they like. Nearly everyone on the app looks the same.” Last week, as we did a deep-dive into Kendall Jenner’s personal style (which, in the scheme of things, isn’t all that dissimilar from CBK’s), another proceeded to opine, “Kendull is lucky she is skinny, has stylists and money. Very boring.” Does it make Kendall any less stylish or Carolyn any more so for wearing plain white button-downs and black Prada bags?

Perhaps not, but placed in the context of things, this dichotomy starts to make a little more sense. “The thing about the ’90s and early-noughties was that if you wanted romance, friends, a social life, you had to go out, so people did,” says La Villardière in her Instagram deep-dive, “No one was taking photos, there was an expectation that you could have fun without visual record.” 

Carolyn wasn’t the first person to layer up with a black woolen coat or borrow her boyfriend’s white Oxford shirt, yet the reason why, on Carolyn, it feels original and on Kendall contrived is the past precedent – or lack thereof, despite both being, for all intents and purposes, tall, slim women with money.

“Initially she’s a break from a certain homogeny,” wrote Smith of the It-girls of the day, “but she eventually ushers in a new kind of homogeny.” 

Like Fairless later says in her podcast, “I still love being in this world, like I’m so happy to just watch this show, regardless of the quality of the episode, because it’s just so escapist and fab.” We aren’t lining up at Selima Optics because their sunglasses are necessarily novel or entirely original.

It’s just that we want a slice of that ’90s Carolyn cool, because, as La Villardière concludes, “it was really that good!”

Is Creativity in the Room With Us?

It’s for this reason alone, dear reader, that Love Story currently ranks as FX’s most-watched limited series ever on Hulu and Disney+, the reason why Calvin Klein bets on continued interest in the CBK mania, rolling out the 1990s edit – a range of ’ slip dresses inspired by their former employee – thus capitalizing on what Style Analytics calls “the Love Story effect.”

Pidgeon, as Carolyn, doesn’t even consistently wear those signature tortoiseshell headbands in the show, yet their demand surged 45% on Lyst. Pidgeon does, however, show up in one of those Calvin Klein slip dresses at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. 

In true Carolyn form. Which is to say: the loop is complete.

Inspiration becomes replication becomes commerce becomes culture — and then all over again. And as someone who reveled in references – remember that 2001 Balenciaga Motorcycle Bag I went high and low to acquire? – I used to think this obsession with getting it right was harmless, even thrilling. 

But you see, fashion today – on the runway, on the red carpet, and now on the screen – functions as a kind of living archive. On platforms like Depop and eBay, buyers and sellers have become hyper-literate… and hyper-specific, algorithmically refined, historically precise. We saw it coming when Love Story’s first press photos dropped last summer, to immediate backlash over the historical inaccuracies of the ensembles. We saw it when Carolyn’s iconic FW96 Prada coat sold for a whopping $192,000 at an auction.

Fashion, in other words, has become a syllabus. And the thing about syllabi? They reward correctness. Yes, knowledge is a virtue, but it’s not the same as creativity. And when every look you put out aims to be historically accurate, every reference instantly legible and pre-loaded with context, where does that leave room for discovery? Where does that leave room for mystery?

After all, isn’t that the essence of every it-girl out there – mystery?