When fashion watchdog Instagram account Diet Prada posted the images, everyone from Moda Operandi cofounder Lauren Santo Domingo to influencer Camille Charrière commented with disdain (the post has over 1,300 comments). Stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson opined: “Please up the wardrobe budgets. I know the silhouettes look the same but Zara is very different from vintage Calvin, Narciso, Jil [Sander]…send help.”

The collective fervour was so loud that American Love Story creator and showrunner Murphy had to do some early damage control. “Carolyn Bessette is clearly a religious figure and it’s a religion of her own,” he told Variety, “It’s very interesting that people become so inflammatory.” He also sat down with Puck to explain that the images he shared are apparently not the show’s final looks. “It was a work in progress but I released it, because sometimes you put things out and the paparazzi backs off, so your actors don’t feel attacked,” he told the site. He also shared that there is a yet-to-be-announced 10-person “style advisory board” in the works to make sure the final costumes hit the right note.

(We reached out to FX for comment on the “controversy” and have yet to receive a response. We’ll update this article if we do.)

Still, fashion fans and critics weren’t appeased. “It felt like [Ryan Murphy] posted the camera test images and videos thinking he would be lauded and everyone would be excited about this series and did not expect to be derided over the costume choices,” Heather Clawson, also known as Habitually Chic on Instagram and Substack, told Glamour. “As everyone has said, the pieces they chose looked cheap and the fit was off, especially the cropped pants with the kitten heels.”

Plenty of biopics have missed a mark or two in terms of fashion accuracy, but for Bessette-Kennedy — whose mythic sense of style has been relentlessly chronicled both in life and death — the stakes feel particularly high. And, despite its presumed simplicity, nearly impossible to replicate in 2025.

Clawson attributes the challenge to the strange dichotomy between the pedestal the public has put Bessette-Kennedy on and the enigma she was and still is. Consider how little visual representation actually exists of CBK during the 1990s, the decade during which she worked in the communications department at Calvin Klein and married JFK Jr. There was no social media, no selfies, no algorithms, no steady stream of step-and-repeat photo ops and limited paparazzi shots.

The images that regularly circulate are shockingly cohesive in terms of fashion because she had a defined point of view that felt all her own. “There are a limited number of photos of Carolyn and very few videos of her speaking so people have poured over and analysed every single [photo of her],” Clawson says.

Getty Images

Getty Images

“In total there are maybe 15 to 20 looks we ever saw Bessette-Kennedy in,” says Jack Sehnert who runs the Instagram account @carolynbessette. “You cannot simply exchange one camel coat with another here, because we only saw her in one. It was a mistake to not source or recreate in this situation. Her clothing became her public identity as she [rarely] spoke to the press. We only know her through images and word of mouth.”