The ‘Love Story’ effect is just the start: How fashion brands are reshaping costume design

When images from the set of Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” first leaked, they set the internet ablaze. The late Bessette, who perished alongside husband JFK Jr. and her sister, Lauren, when the plane Kennedy was piloting crashed off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, had become a minimalist style doyenne in the few short years since her marriage to the youngest son of Camelot. Entire Instagram accounts are dedicated to documenting the clothes of the former Calvin Klein publicist, who remains immortalized as a buttery blond glamazon stalking through the New York City streets in Manolo Blahnik pumps and structured Yohji Yamamoto dresses and jackets.

So when the first test shots and paparazzi photos failed, in the internet’s mind, to do justice to the reluctant American icon, longtime Murphy costume collaborator Rudy Mance was brought in to replace costume designer Leah Katznelson, an Emmy nominee in her own right for “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and Murphy’s own “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” for which she won.

Such intense scrutiny is indicative of the fashion world’s growing influence on costume design. Take rising Australian actor Jacob Elordi’s brand ambassadorship with Bottega Veneta, which spilled over into the costuming of the third and final season of “Euphoria”; “And Just Like That…,” which prioritizes runway looks like predecessor “Sex and the City”; or “The Bear,” where food-service employees are decked out in designer duds in a commercial kitchen.

“The key to creating these brand worlds is authenticity,” says Geoff Cook, a partner at creative studio Base Design. “When fashion in entertainment doesn’t reconcile with the content, the viewer immediately feels that it’s inauthentic. That inauthenticity has negative ramifications on both the entertainment piece and the fashion piece.

“What’s happening is that consumers are gravitating to stories that they emotionally engage with as opposed to quick dopamine hits,” Cook continues. “The brands are realizing that and attaching themselves more to longer-form content.”

Cook offers Giorgio Armani’s costuming of “American Gigolo” in 1980 as an example of the symbiosis of costume and fashion design, which helped put Armani on the map and created “a sumptuous world where everyone was decked out in Armani and you just wanted to live in [it].” Another more recent case is director Luca Guadagnino’s employment of Christian Dior Creative Director Jonathan Anderson, who has worked as a costume designer on “Challengers” and “Queer.”

Guadagnino said at a Business of Fashion conference in 2025 that “costume designers, and I’m going to create enemies here, tend to think in terms of the garment. Designers of fashion think in terms of the body.” The director rightly intuited that he would draw the ire of costume designers, with “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “Cruella” costume designer Jenny Beavan, and Kate Hawley, who this year won the Academy Award for costume design for “Frankenstein,” among others, sounding off in the comments on Business of Fashion’s Instagram post from the event.

Mance, who earned his fourth Emmy nomination for his work on “Love Story,” sees a project based on real-life figures as a chance to flex not only his costume design muscles but also his previous experience as a fashion editor at Condé Nast.

“Any time I get to work with fashion designers it’s always a fun collaboration,” he tells The Envelope. Mance and his team partnered closely with the design houses of Prada, Valentino, Klein and Yamamoto on archival pulls of designs Bessette wore, though they could not confirm that any of the exact items of clothing worn by actor Sarah Pidgeon actually graced Bessette’s body. (He estimates that vintage and archival designer pieces made up between 80% to 90% of the total wardrobe on the series.) The garments that they could not find, such as Bessette’s wedding dress, her rehearsal dinner dress and a tan and black ruffle coat from Yamamoto, they re-created using historical images and input from the designers. In the case of Bessette’s wedding attire, one of Mance’s assistants found a swatch of fabric from her Narciso Rodriguez silk slip gown, which they were able to remake using the exact material.

Luxury brands such as these have certainly seen an increase in searches and sales, and a Prada coat worn by Bessette sold for $192,000 at auction while “Love Story” was airing. But it’s arguably smaller brands that have been buoyed by what has been dubbed “the ‘Love Story’ effect.” C.O. Bigelow, a Greenwich Village pharmacy that made the plastic headbands Bessette was so fond of, reported a 500% sales increase since 2023, and Selima Optique have rereleased the style Bessette wore because of popular demand.

Adhering so closely to historical accuracy doesn’t come without issues, though. “It’s a double-edged sword,” Mance says. “On one hand, you know exactly what it is and what you have to do, but on the other hand, you know exactly what it is and what you have to do.”

The most daunting challenge was intuiting what Bessette would have worn in the years before she met Kennedy and became one of the most photographed women in the world. “I let what she wore later inform what she wore earlier,” he says. “It was nice to play around with that and still keep her very aspirational but do a pared-down, East Village version of her.”

Not only that, but a lot of “Love Story” takes place behind the public facades of Kennedy and Bessette, in the offices of Calvin Klein and inside Kennedy’s Tribeca loft.

“What do they wear at 2 a.m. when they’re having a fight in the apartment when there are no cameras around and it’s just the two of them, or her having lunch with her sister? That was the fun challenge of figuring out who these characters were through the clothes,” Mance says.

Even for as accomplished a veteran as Mance, though, the specter of social media critics and armchair fashionistas is a novel one, reaching a fever pitch as projects such as “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and “And Just Like That…” are dissected before the finished product is out in the world.

“You do your best, you try and get through it, and you hope that at the end you get an Emmy nomination, which I did!” Mance chuckles.