If you sat front row or even just scrolled through the fall/winter 2026 show reviews you noticed a certain woman appearing again and again. Tall, unhurried, with pieces of blonde hair escaping whatever she’d done with it that morning. A white shirt that was clearly borrowed from the men’s section. A pencil skirt worn with the same ease as jeans. Boots that had no business being that cool. She looked like she was late for something important and completely unbothered about it.
That woman was Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and this season, she was everywhere.
CBK has always had her devotees the vintage slip dress crowd, the Ivy League art history girls, the women who discovered her through a single photograph and never quite recovered. But with Love Story taking over television and Sarah Pidgeon bringing an entirely new generation into the obsession, Bessette Kennedy’s particular brand of effortlessness is being rediscovered on a much larger scale. The runways felt it immediately.
Here is where her influence landed, and how to wear it now.
The Pencil Skirt
The quietly radical thing about a simple beige pencil skirt is that it asks nothing of you and gives everything back. Bessette Kennedy wore Prada’s version in 1996 and made it look like the only reasonable choice a woman could make. This season, Milan agreed. Even Demna worked it into Gucci, putting it on Karlie Kloss in a moment that felt like a direct conversation with the nineties. In New York, Marc Jacobs kept the spirit but injected some color a vivid aqua sweater against the neutral skirt, messy hair, heavy boots. Very CBK, slightly more chaotic.
The Strapless Gown
Bessette Kennedy wore hers to a Municipal Art Society benefit in 1998, paired with black opera gloves that managed to look simultaneously formal and completely her own. Richard Quinn picked up the reference in London but switched the gloves to white, giving it a different kind of drama. Michael Kors added a deep slit to his version, which he debuted at the Metropolitan Opera a few blocks, and a few decades, from where the original was worn.
The Leopard Coat
A great coat can rescue any outfit, and Bessette Kennedy understood that better than almost anyone. Her vintage leopard faux fur body-skimming, hitting just above the knee turned even a jeans-and-sweater combination into something worth photographing. The original sold at Sotheby’s last December for $33,600. Which means the versions that came down the Marni and Willy Chavarria runways this season are, relatively speaking, a bargain. Girl math holds up.
The Big White Shirt
Hers was Yohji Yamamoto menswear, worn with the collar open and the sleeves slightly too long. That particular nonchalance is harder to fake than it looks, but designers are making it easier TWP and Gap both do genuinely oversized versions that have the right weight and proportion. At Dolce & Gabbana and Fendi, the big white shirt came paired with slinky black skirts in a combination that felt directly lifted from her archive. One tip worth keeping: if you go for a lace version, a simple black slip underneath keeps the texture without the transparency.
The Messy Ponytail
Bessette Kennedy’s hair was so specific that particular shade of cool blonde, those particular escaping pieces that Love Story’s team had to re-dye Sarah Pidgeon’s hair after viewers complained the first version was too yellow. The standard, it turns out, was exacting. But the ponytail itself is the most democratic thing she ever wore. Prada, Jil Sander, The Row, and Hermès all paid tribute this season. Dior’s version, styled by Guido Palau loose, low, a little undone came closest to the original. The good news is that it works on every hair color. Bessette Kennedy would probably say that was always the point.