Let me say something the fashion internet is absolutely not going to like.

There is a very specific kind of white feminine obsession with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and it is time we talked about it honestly.

After the viral sensation of Ryan Murphy’s “Love Story,” CBK (new nickname) has become a blueprint, a Pinterest board and minimalist personality. The irony is that the very women who claim her as their style icon are embodying everything she spent her entire public life running from.

She would have hated all of it.

This was a woman who concealed her wedding on an island in the deep south, who gave no interviews and who built walls because the world would not stop climbing them. The “cool” you are replicating was not a vibe. Yes, I’m looking at the women swarming the hair counter at C.O Bigelow. CBK was a woman in survival mode dressed up as minimalism because she had no other choice.

A certain subset of women have taken that armor, removed all the pain that forged it and turned it into an aesthetic. To be quite honest it’s become a Halloween costume with better tailoring.

You are not channeling her. You are consuming her. Just like everyone else did when she was alive.

On what the obsession is actually about.

Here is the truth underneath the style.

The obsession with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is not really about her. It never was. It is about the fantasy of a woman who appeared not to care and moved through the world unbothered with America’s son on her arm. In a culture that demands women to pay penance for the world’s most eligible bachelor, she ignored it and JFK jr loved her for it. America hated her freedom and took it away one paparazzi photo at a time.

What read as effortlessness was almost certainly exhaustion. What looked like restraint was a woman giving the world as little as possible and kept her authenticity for her loved ones.

To watch a woman’s life become a trend is not admiration. It is the same violation she experienced when she was alive with better lighting and capitalism.

You cannot copy the original. You can only make it tacky.

The woman who used the blueprint well.

There is a certain trope of skinny white women icons throughout history. Marie Antoinette, Twiggy, Farrah Fawcett and each brought their special sauce and ran with it.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy walked so Gwyneth Paltrow could run. She took that same composed, uncluttered, unapologetic femininity and built an empire on it with a dash of monetizing indigenous remedies for the masses. GP turned minimalism into a lifestyle revenue stream. Whether you love or loathe what she built, she ran with it entirely on her own terms.

Lauren Santo Domingo took that same energy and curated Moda Operandi. She’s become an icon of the “polished white woman” who moves through power rooms without shrinking.

Love it or hate it they curated inspiration followed by invention. Not replication and not a dead woman’s grief repackaged as a capsule wardrobe.

The take.

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy deserves to rest.

She deserves to be remembered as a human being who was complicated, private and (along with her sister) gone far too soon. CBK should not be remembered as an aesthetic.

The women doing truly interesting things with style right now are not the ones pinning her outfits. They are the ones who absorbed the real lesson of dressing for your lifestyle. Dress for yourself or you spend a lifetime following trends and dressing for everyone else.

Stop copying the blueprint. Become the architect and be your own muse.