The World We Knew
It's a Love Story mega edition!
Happy Friday, babies!!! This is severely late because wow wow wow am I currently S I C K. Yesterday I felt like crap but it felt more like a mental and emotional situash, and today I realized that I was sick in the same way that toddlers throw tantrums because they’re actually just not feeling well. So it’s been one of those days where I can finish writing a paragraph but then I need to take a nap, and so on and so forth, but I finally managed to finish this!
Anyway, today a new episode of Love Story hits Hulu/Disney+, and I gotta tell you - I’ve been looking forward to it all week.
To my supreme delight, the internet is also seeing a FLOOD of articles, Threads, and IG posts about the show, fashion-obsessed NYC in the ‘90s, and the real-life JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
FYI, this is a longer one but I really enjoyed it:
I have been EATING UP all the stories like the one above from people who lived in NYC and worked in fashion and magazines in the ‘90s. New York is not really my town, but New York in the ‘80s or ‘90s???? The MTV + Style with Elsa Klensch era of New York, back when magazine editors could expense flights on the Concorde and fashion houses and supermodels ruled everything around me??!?! This was the exact era that, as a kid, I longed to be an adult in (and then when I finally did become an adult, I was a lame-o Bible College person who gave up those glamorous dreams to go follow the Lord).
So I am definitely living vicariously through all the Threads like the ones above and articles like the one in The Cut about what it was like to work in the Calvin Klein offices during that time. Curbed also did an article about Getting ’90s New York Right in Love Story; and, perhaps most notably, Carole Radziwell wrote about the renewed frenzy from people to know more about her famously private friends from their famously private friends (Carole famously wrote about her closeness with John and Carolyn in her excellent, reportedly ghost-written book What Remains).
This brings up something that I think is so fascinating about the John and Carolyn story: While I’m personally grateful that we’re able to watch John and Carolyn’s wedding tapes and hear personal stories about them -
…I also deeply respect the friends who still remain tight-lipped about John and Carolyn and protect their privacy to this day.
And I personally feel conflicted because I have a HUGE problem with people - Ryan Murphy in particular - who think they can take a famous name or historical figure and then just apply whatever motivations or interpretations they want to that person.
Jokes aside, this hit me:
But also, while I respect Jack and Daryl’s viewpoints, I am very nosy!!! And respecting other people’s privacy is not in my nature!!! People like that are the same kind of people who had private Instagrams back in 2014, when only the most secure people didn’t want clicks and Likes on main, and once again, that was and is not me!!!
Anyway! Here’s some fun Love Story content to wrap this up:
It’s kind of funny to me that everyone is making such a big deal over the way that Carolyn constantly flipped her hair -
…but that’s what we did in the ‘90s! The hairspray ‘80s were gone, and so it was VERY hot to be able flick or flip your hair and have it cascade that way!
I also say this as someone who used flip and flick and toss my hair like the above so much (I always wanted my long hair to cascade just so) that I got made fun of it senior year when pals sitting in a theater balcony were immediately able to spot me down in the orchestra section simply by the way I ran my hand through my hair.
That’s it for today! I’m off to eat ice cream (which is a thing I only do when I’m really sick, so sometimes it’s like, “yay, I’m sick, I get to eat ice cream!” but it’s also “aw FUCK, I’m SICK, gimme that ice cream!!!”) whilst I soak in the latest episode of Love Story.
Hope you had a great Friday, and I’ll check back in with you later this weekend!
-Amber
ADDENDUM:
Below is Candace Bushnell’s thinly-veiled “satire serial series” about Carolyn Bessette. She expanded it, named the character “Cecelia”, and slightly rewrote it for her book 4 BLONDES, which I won’t post here because that feels like a copyright issue but will link you to it here instead (btw, I used to have all of Bushnell’s hardcovers and now I’m kicking myself for getting rid of them when I moved to Portland). There wasn’t a great place to jam the below column into the post above but since it’s not widely available online anymore except on Reddit, I’m posting it below for your and my future reference.
