Millennial nostalgia is at a fever pitch right now. We have the right balance of disposable income and low-to-mid-level dissatisfaction with how adulthood turned out for our nostalgia to be profitable. Hence all the legacy sequels to movies we watched as children. Hence the limited series remakes of movies we were slightly to young to be watching as children. Hence the success of Ryan Murphy’s most respectable output—glossily dramatic reenactments of major 90s news stories.

With the exception of the Glee performance of “Teenage Dream,” American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson is almost definitely the best thing Ryan Murphy has created. (I say this as a noted Ryan Murphy hater, mind you.) The show aired in early 2016, when the country was in the midst of the first big Black Lives Matter wave. Audiences were primed for a narrative about race and the criminal justice system in a way we wouldn’t have been even five years earlier. On top of that, The People vs. OJ Simpson managed to weave all the threads—race and policing, and also celebrity, gender, and the beginning of America’s fascination with “true crime”—quite beautifully, while keeping juuust on the right side of exploitative.

The next Ryan Murphy true crime installments have not been so successful, either at meeting the zeitgeist or at being more humane than exploitative. But Love Story, a dramatic reenactment of the romance and death of John F. Kennedy, Jr and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, seems to have hit just as our 90s nostalgia is cresting.¹ And what I’ve found most intriguing about the reaction to the show is how it’s clarifying what its fans are nostalgic for.

I’ll name right now that, as far as style icons go, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy means nothing to me. 90s minimalism is not my thing. Straight blonde hair is not my thing. This specific kind of Manhattan socialite is not my thing. But this isn’t the case for a lot of Gen X and millennial fashion girlies. Like, there’s a vocal enough contingent of CBK fans that their displeasure at the initial shooting photos made the producers hire a new costume designer and change actress Sarah Pidgeon’s hair to be a more accurate shade of blonde. This woman and her style file really matter to people.

Fascinating how often the words “timeless” and “effortless” come up when describing this style. Especially considering Carolyn worked in the fashion industry, which means she must have put a lot of effort into developing her sense of style, acquiring and maintaining the items that fit said style, and promoting said style as fashionable. A woman with that many crisp white button-downs probably had a tab at the dry cleaners, you know? But she also had the qualities that erase all signs of effort: thinness, whiteness, and money. Because that’s typically what “timeless” and “effortless” actually mean.

Let’s take this iconic wedding photo of Carolyn and Jack, and the commentary:

“The Narciso Rodriguez dress. The hand kiss. The private island. Nobody will ever touch the effortless chic of Carolyn and John. Truly the end of an era.”

Mind you, Carolyn was:

This is the tone that CBK acolytes always adopt when talking about her, though. A wistful longing for a return to the elegance that she signified, and a willing avoidance of the elements that made her elegance possible.

In the 90s, this look and this socioeconomic class of people were called “old money.” Today, it’s “quiet luxury.” Regardless of the label, the moral and aesthetic sensibilities remain the same: visually unobtrusive, unfussy, quiet in its power and implied confidence.

People yearning for this aesthetic expression of wealth and power right now makes sense to me, considering that our current most dominant expression of wealth and power is another famous New Yorker.

There’s a whole name for the Trump aesthetic as well (for women, at least)—Mar-a-Lago face. It runs perpendicular to the CBK/JFK Jr style in every way: visually ostentatious, calling attention to its falseness, and loud and anxious in its need to seem powerful. The women’s distorted faces, the men’s vacuum-sealed suits, and RJK Jr’s never-nude jorts are such an on-the-nose representation of how warped and ill-fitting these people are in these massively powerful roles. They are utterly repulsive people, and I understand the revulsion they inspire. I feel it, too!

Howevuh. Nostalgia for 90s gentility does feel like a bit of a dodge, though. Like we’re nostalgic for a time when we didn’t know any better, and a time when we had beautiful American royalty to charm us into being happy with massive wealth and power, as long as they were discreet about it. Because I feel like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s brand of minimalism is quite emphatically committed to upholding the status quo. In being so pointedly neutral and taking up so little visual and physical space, the wearer is reassuring their audience that they are not a threat. They will not be a challenge or an embarrassment. To put it in Sex and the City terms—and why wouldn’t we?—there’s a reason Mr. Big married a sleek minimalist who works at Ralph Lauren² after fleeing to Paris because his relationship with Carrie was too emotionally (and sartorially) challenging. He wanted someone who wouldn’t make waves.

It reminds me of how many Democrats’ objection to Trump committing numerous war crimes and threatening genocide on social media is that he didn’t get Congressional approval first. It’s giving “return to civility.” And we deserve better than a return to the status quo, don’t we? We deserve better than a return to assuming everything is okay because the people at the top of this power structure are understated about it.