This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.How Love Story Costume Designer Rudy Mance Recreated Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Iconic Wedding Dress Exactly

Caroline HallemannFri, March 13, 2026 at 3:40 PM UTC

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Love Story’s Rudy Mance on Recreating HistoryFX

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There was little room for error. When Love Story costume designer Rudy Mance was tasked with recreating Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wedding dress, one of the most iconic bridal looks of the past century, he knew he had to get it right. Not only is the audience watching this series with a keen, often critical eye about the show’s fashions, but he always wanted to honor the legacies of the real-life people this story is depicting.

“Everyone involved has such respect for [John and Carolyn], and I think a lot of people are protective of them because we lost them so early in their lives, and everybody has their image of them. Even in speaking with people around town, everybody has a story. If they were in New York City in the ’90s, like, ‘Oh my God, I saw them once or said hi to me.’ And so I think that there's a protectiveness there that I share with people. So I just wanted to do them justice and hopefully tell a great story.”

Here, he speaks with T&C on his approach to the costumes on Love Story, including how he recreated John and Carolyn’s wedding looks exactly:

What was your approach to costumes on Love Story? Were you trying to recreate outfits exactly from history? Or were you trying to capture the essence of these characters and the clothes they were?

I would say both. I think it was a combination. Anything that was historically accurate in terms of being very well documented—obviously the wedding and the suit and the wedding dress, but also the very heartbreaking fight that they had that was so well publicized, and when they come back from the honeymoon and the press is sort of stalked outside of their house and camped out, and so he went inside, put on a suit, and she put on the very iconic head-to-toe Prada look like the Prada boots, the Prada like pencil skirt, tan, and the men’s v-neck. I think it was a men's V-neck sweater from Prada. She wore menswear quite a bit.

John and Carolyn outside their Tribeca loft, shortly after returning to New York from their honeymoon.Lawrence Schwartzwald - Getty Images

For those very iconic, iconic and sort of well-documented things, yes, I wanted to follow it as exact as possible. But then within that, you also did try to capture the essence of who they were. We don't really know what she wore at 3 a.m. home alone. So we took some liberties there. But we also, I spoke with Sunita Kumar Nairwho wrote the CBK book, and she had a lot of insights.

So for instance, there's a scene with a white nightgown. They had, I think, originally scripted that she was in a silk slip with a robe, very chic, but it just sort of felt—not necessarily out of place—but it just didn't feel like the character that we had where she had been in where she was going. And so I asked Sunita, thank God, and she was like, no. She wore a very basic white cotton nightgown that was almost a bit, just very sort of basic and plain. And so that's what we wound up doing. And once we put it on her, both Sarah [Pidgeon] and I were like, ah, this feels right. This feels like our version of Carolyn.

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There isn't a lot of footage of Carolyn; she didn't do interviews. There are just these images of her in these clothes, and so her fashion identity is so tightly connected to how people feel about her. Why do you think her look has become so iconic? And why do you think people have such strong feelings about her fashion?

I think that she was almost an instant icon from the first photograph that was ever taken of her after she met JFK Jr. I think it's a combination of things. She was so ahead of her time, but also so of the time.

I started out as an assistant fashion editor and came up through Conde Nast and worked in London at ID magazine. And so she's always been on the mood board since forever. She was just sort of a constant, and him as well. So I think that's a big reason. And then of course, the resurgence of the ’90s aesthetic, which had been happening for quite a bit now. And there's very many different versions of ’90s fashion. You can have the very sort of over-the-top bold colors, bold prints. But then with her, it was much more refined and, in a lot of ways, so simple, but just so chic. It really was about the fabrics and the way they draped and the way that they hung on her. And again, it was just, I think the fact that she was so timeless and so classic. That was the statement in and of itself.

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The real-life Carolyn at a party at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1999.Patrick McMullan - Getty ImagesWhat was your approach to the wedding episode?

We did extensive, extensive research. Narciso Rodriguez, who worked with Carolyn at Calvin Klein. He designed her dress, and I believe he designed the rehearsal dress as well, because one of my assistants had found sketches that he published.

And then we found [an image of] one model wearing the rehearsal dress from the back, and then randomly a week or two before somebody had posted online a couple of photos that we had never seen of the rehearsal dress. So we used that and pieced that together. But that was kind of the approach to everybody. We did boards of the wedding, everything we could find. We found this incredible image of all of the men from the bridal party, because obviously the women—she was famously running late. She was having trouble getting into the dress, they had to sew her into it. So we had one great image of all of the men standing outside of the wedding waiting for them. And so we pieced together a lot.

John and Carolyn’s wedding, as depicted on Love Story.FXAre you sourcing pieces for those looks, or are you creating everything custom?

Both. It was a combination. I had a team in New York that went to every single vintage shop. And when that didn't work, we went online, Etsy, first dibs, eBay, eBay Tokyo, all of it

We literally had pieces coming in from all over the world. And then I had a very small team of one or two, depending on the workload in L.A., and they would go to all of the vintage houses there and the costume rental houses.

And so obviously for Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr., we had to make their looks. And it was very, very, very important to me to nail it, not only to pay my due respect to the two of them, but also to Gordon Henderson, who was a friend of Carolyn's who also worked at Calvin Klein. With her, he actually designed John's beautiful suit that he wears at the wedding. And then Narciso famously designed the wedding dress. So it was important for me to get it right for Carolyn and John, but also for Narciso and Gordon, to make sure that it looked accurate.

With the way the show depicts the wedding, we see Carolyn being sewn into the dress. Tell me about that process of creating an unfinished dress that's so core to the story.

We were also shooting in the mud and extreme heat in the middle of nowhere, and I think it had just rained two days before. So I was a little bit panicked too because it's a white dress. We actually made three.

We made one for her to be sewn into, one that was proper, and then a third one just as a prop slash Hail Mary. And we had found out through our research, again, another member of my incredible team, that Narciso had gone to B&J Fabrics, which is still here in New York. And so we spoke with the owners and they actually kept a swatch of the actual fabric that Narciso used. So through them, we contacted the mill in Europe and got them to send us the original fabric in the same color lot. And so her dress was recreated out of that original fabric. Same goes for the shoes. We spoke with Manolo Blahnik, and they allowed us into their archives. And the company, which I think called Lacrasia, and then it switched to Wing and Weft, but they're a glove company here in New York, very famous for many years, and they had made her original transparent gloves and matching veil. So we reached out to them and they still had their swatches, their swatches and their sketches, her actual hand print. So we used that to recreate those pieces as well.

Love Story airs Thursday nights on FX and streams on Hulu.

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