John F. Kennedy Jr. was not a baggy cargo shorts guy. Plaid boxers that he Rollerbladed in? Sure. Two-inch inseam track shorts? Yep.
But cargoes? Not really. Yet, in a Uniqlo Instagram post clearly attempting to emulate JFK Jr.’s style, a young man walks down a city street in to-the-knee cargos, a polo and a backward hat. The rest of the slide show, which Uniqlo captioned “inspired by icons” of the ’90s, was a carousel of generic preppy tropes: Henley shirts, tan Harrington jackets and slim chinos. Without the backward hat and a blond companion, none of it feels tethered to Mr. Kennedy.
Since the release of “Love Story,” the FX television series about Mr. Kennedy and his doomed marriage to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, we’ve seen a lot of brands jumping on the viral popularity of the show by mimicking some aspect of JFK Jr.’s image. Most of these attempts are inaccurate; some of them are downright sad.
In a Polo Ralph Lauren Instagram post, a young man in a tan linen suit and boarding-school suspenders walks his bike down a city street. Mr. Kennedy was more of a navy suit guy — but I’ll give them bonus points because the model does sort of look like a Kennedy. At least his incongruously sporty sunglasses and reversed ball cap land closer to what Mr. Kennedy actually wore.
The show, which members of the Kennedy family have spoken out against, has catapulted JFK Jr. into “internet boyfriend” status, nearly 27 years after his death. There have been look-alike contests in New York and Washington. But when an international chain like Starbucks is making an Instagram post of a guy in a suit holding a coffee on a bike (as JFK Jr. was wont to do), we’re dealing with a larger phenomenon.
On TikTok in recent weeks, young guys have been afflicted with the notion that they can ape Mr. Kennedy’s image. Mostly, though, these men just look like they raided a J.Crew in a supermarket sweep. They post themselves wearing ties with rolled-sleeve dress shirts, whatever chinos and backward hats that accentuate their lacrosse-player flow.
Of course, most guys falter when trying to copy a guy who was named People’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” But there was more to Mr. Kennedy’s thick-haired, granola-breath prep sensibility than people seem able to grasp.
Mr. Kennedy was a to-the-manner-born WASP who dressed as if he never actually thought about his clothes. This is, as ever, the great irony of most packaged fashion trends — you just can’t achieve the promise they’re offering. Original trendsetters often didn’t think much about what they wore. (See: Birkin, Jane.)
At least Mr. Kennedy wasn’t precious with his clothes: He cycled in his designer suits, looping a bike lock around his trousers. He popped his blazers’ collars and wore doofy hats, confident that his good looks could do the work of pulling them off.
I haven’t yet seen a TikToker risk a wool vest over a silky shirt, as the real man did. These videos and bandwagon-jumping brand posts whistle right past the kookier deviations that made Mr. Kennedy’s style interesting.
We tend to do this when we’re looking back at fashionable people or trends: distilling things down to their easiest to copy attributes. A couple years back, when it became trendy to dress like a “Friends” character, what people really meant was that khakis and big shirts were popular again. When someone says “Seinfeld” is stylish, aren’t they just saying that washed-out jeans are back in vogue?
To that end, the broad, inexact interest in looking like Mr. Kennedy falls in with a recent valorization of the perennially preppy aesthetics of young, largely white people, from Nantucket to Newport. Think of the quarter-zip fad. And what is Mr. Kennedy if not the idealized partner of a certain West Village Girl? Prep school rep ties and oxford shirts have washed onto the Dior runway. Polo, with its cable-knit sweaters and big logoed rugbys, was one of the best-received presentations of the latest Paris Fashion Week.
In this regard, “Love Story” has served up to brands and influencers another way to post about something that has already been swirling around. The show isn’t sparking a trend; it’s riding one.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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