Before Carolyn Bessette, in the New York of the 1990s the icon was Kelly Klein, the perfect embodiment of the style of that time. Today we are rediscovering her thanks to the series “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” where she is played by Leila George, who has restored to the public the image of the woman who, behind the scenes, was among those who helped make that crucial decade for fashion.
Passionate about riding since childhood and a graduate of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, Kelly was also a regular presence in New York’s most legendary nightlife of those years. The story goes that it was at Studio 54 that she met Calvin Klein who, after initially rejecting her application, personally offered her a job in his company as an assistant designer. From that meeting came a love affair that many describe as overwhelming and intense, culminating in a wedding celebrated in Rome in 1986.
Kelly remained the designer’s muse for years, able to perfectly embody the Calvin Klein woman: sophisticated, essential, effortlessly sensual. Her role, however, was not limited to image: in fact, it seems that she was also a creative mind behind important commercial successes of the brand, such as the intuition to propose men’s underwear worn by women. It seems almost inevitable, then, that meeting Carolyn Bessette at Calvin Klein resulted in an understanding that went beyond mere aesthetic taste. According to a number of sources, when Carolyn began dating John F. Kennedy Jr. the two of them often dated just Calvin and Kelly Klein, sharing evenings and moments of New York social life.
After ten years of marriage, Kelly and Calvin separated, although they remained very close, and the divorce was not formalized until ten years later, in April 2006. Even in later years, the two maintained a close friendship and were photographed together on several public occasions.
[📸 Getty Images; IPA]
