Issue 22.
Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s Complicated Legacy, Sydney’s Hailey Bieber Fever & Vogue’s Succession Saga
Bieber Fever: The Event That Stopped The Nation
Thank you Hailey Bieber for filling me with some good old-fashioned Aussie pride this past week.
Sydney’s reaction to the RHODE founder’s visit to launch the brand at MECCA was the feel-good reminder we all needed: nothing is more Australian than the bold, unapologetic and shameless way we embrace an international celebrity.
I couldn’t be prouder. We’ve still got it guys.
Culture wars, politics and divisive views may try to keep us apart, but they’ll never come between this nation and an A-list celebrity in town for less than 72 hours!
Meet me outside in a dark alley if you want to argue that Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton’s 2006 Sydney visit — the one where they walked across Bondi Beach with oversized metallic Louis Vuitton handbags, caftans and sunglasses the size of dinner plates — wasn’t a defining 21st-century pop culture moment.
What other country makes the appearance of a 29-year-old at a retail store a leading story on a national news network?!
It brought a tear to my eye to see endless queues wrapped around MECCA’s flagship George Street store, screaming fans who had lined up since dawn just to get a glimpse of Bieber’s scalp through a pane of glass.
Then there was the influencer event in Sydney’s east, where content creators fan girled and painted feeds in a sea of ubiquitous pale blue, peptide lip treatments, zoomed in photos of Bieber and breakfast muffins.
I was slightly amused watching Hailey pose for photos in the exact spot where my cellulite and I usually stand dripping wet, looking dreadful while waiting for a coffee most weekend mornings.
By most accounts, Bieber was sweet, beautiful in person and generous with her time. Pleasing to hear. There’s nothing worse than an ungracious celebrity who has amassed a great fortune thanks to loyal fans investing time and money in them, only to be rude at an event that exists entirely to celebrate them.
I did feel Hails may have preferred to be elsewhere at the Wuthering Heights premiere on Thursday. Maybe she’s not a big Emily Brontë fan. Or maybe she just wanted to kick back in her hotel suite and fire off a 5-minute voice note to Kendall about the terrible placement of Selena’s Rare Beauty in Sephora.
But none of that matters, this nation owes her a great debt.
The Devil Wears Too Many Hats: Vogue’s Succession Saga
A New York Times interview between Anna Wintour and her “successor,” Chloe Malle, is a masterclass in passive-aggressive power play — and a feat of structural engineering for the Chanel eyewear team.
With her eyes as sealed off from the world as North Korea, it’s clear US Vogue’s succession plan won’t be resolved until the former US Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief’s Slack account is deactivated and she’s physically escorted from the office.
Now, Global Editorial Director of Vogue and Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast, Wintour belongs to a rare cohort of 70+ executives who are expanding their workload while drafting a will as a side hobby.
She still oversees all 28 international editions of the magazine and chairs the Met Gala; overstaying her welcome may as well be the title of her biography.
Poor Chloe. She never stood a chance.
As Head of Editorial Content US, her title feels like the physical embodiment of 2026 corporate jargon gaslighting: the longer it is, the more authoritative it sounds; the more HR execs hope we ignore it’s a total downgrade!
The five-minute clip is so toe-curlingly awkward to watch I had to take multiple breaks. What’s framed as a conversation about Vogue’s next chapter feels less like a media interview and more like an mediation session.
There’s rigid body language. Nervous laughter from Malle, who glances at Wintour every other answer, especially when she says something vaguely punchy. Passive, elliptical responses. And Anna: scowling, inscrutable, looking like she would rather be literally anywhere else.
Credit is due to Chloe for deftly weaving in some subtle passive put-downs while simultaneously playing the corporate martyr role to perfection.
Asked what she’d do with a bigger budget, she offered: “build a whole new podcast studio, pay everyone 30% more, expand the social team, and ensure the app was fully staffed.”
Anna responds with a smile as genuine as real estate agent before undercutting Chloe entirely: “To be clear, we have a very healthy budget at Vogue. How we use our resources is changing constantly depending on the moment.”
At one point, I was convinced the 76-year-old’s frames might fog up with smoke when Malle described how she wants to change the perception of the editor’s role at Vogue.
“Sometimes in fashion, people can be too cool, unavailable, a bit laconic — and for me, I’m just never going to be that person,” Malle says of her editorial approach.
Ouch.
You can practically see the email notification from Anna lighting up Malle’s laptop the second the cameras stopped rolling: Quick chat re: alignment.
Perhaps she should make a swift detour to Chanel and pick up her own pair of shades for the debrief.
The Commodification of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy
DISCLAIMER: This article includes a majorly hypocritical headline written by an obnoxious writer. I’m no better than everyone else and have CBK: A Life in Fashion looking right at me now on my coffee table. Show your disdain in the comment section!
Bracing for disappointment was the collective mood for Ryan Murphy’s Love Story, a nine-part series exploring the relationship and tragic deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy that debuted last week on Disney +.
Expectations were low. The trailer felt like a 3pm Hallmark special, and early production stills went viral last year thanks to costumes so cheap-looking it seemed as though Temu had been appointed the show’s official wardrobe sponsor.
Thankfully, the backlash forced a course correction: no tan pleather coats, no ¾ leggings better suited to an episode of Teen Mom, and mercifully, a rethink of Carolyn’s hair colour.
“We made some more dramatic changes. We brought in a brilliant costume designer who sourced a lot of original pieces that CBK wore. We went to the actual collectors, to people who’d written books about her fashion and style, and we formed a brain trust,” executive producer Brad Simpson told The Hollywood Reporter.
Only three episodes have aired so far, and they’ve been nothing but enjoyable and easy to watch (no tragedies have occurred yet). Plus, a banging ’90s soundtrack.
Sarah Pidgeon rises to the challenge of portraying Carolyn during her Calvin Klein years and the early stages of her relationship with JFK Jr. No easy task, as Bessette Kennedy famously never gave an interview during her lifetime and only three known speaking clips of her exist.
Still, Pidgeon manages to bring to life the intelligence, warmth, and the irreverent edge those who knew her often described.
Paul Anthony Kelly’s performance as JFK Jr. is fine, but it’s his eerie resemblance to the late son of President John F. Kennedy that makes it a home run from the casting team.
The less said about Naomi Watts as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the better.
Hopefully Hulu doesn’t stream in Heaven, Jackie would be mortified. Watts’ interpretation veers into caricature: stiff, cold, and saddled with a breathy vocal affectation that makes it sound as though she’s fighting off a bad bout of hiccups.
But the real tragedy is the afterlife of Carolyn over the last 26 and a half years.
Every inch of her minimalist, pared-back style has been copied, dissected, and commercialised to the point where her legacy now functions primarily as a Pinterest mood board, an SEO keyword for “quiet luxury,” or the automatic answer every influencer gives when asked to name a style icon.
How many TikToks do we need explaining how to style a white shirt that “gives major CBK vibes”?!
Early, tragic deaths mythologise a person in a way longevity never can. But it also freezes them. Flattens them. In this day and age the recourse is extra brutal, we’re left with Shop The Look links, endless “Top 10 Outfits” headlines, TikTok dissections, and Substack essays.
The real person behind it all is hard to see.
“CBK style was never about the item; it was about the attitude.”
“People tend to romanticize her restraint as if it were some grand, conceptual act of minimalism. But I believe the truth is much simpler: She was a young woman working in fashion, carefully buying designer pieces on a fashion-girl budget,” Lauren Santo Domingo wrote for Town & Country, offering one of the more humanising perspectives on Carolyn in recent years.
“She wasn’t curating an aesthetic manifesto; she was doing what the rest of us were doing—albeit a whole lot better than everyone else.”
I really loved these articles - the effortless elegance and non curated style of CBK, juxtaposed against the modern day curated Hailey Bieber almost 30 years since CBK’s passing (while maybe not intentional) spoke volumes, it’s still hard to replicate