THE WASHINGTON POST: Would you pay $US78,000 for Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s Prada coat?

When it comes to clothing, just how much is the aura of celebrity worth?

According to fashion fans, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Three of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s garments sold at Sotheby’s this week for a whopping $US177,600 ($285,000), more than double the $US50,000-to-$US70,000 combined estimates. The pieces, part of the auction house’s annual Fashion Icons sale, were a single-breasted black Prada coat, from the mid-1990s, which was estimated at $US15,000 to $US20,000 but sold for $US78,000 after receiving 17 bids; a vintage leopard-print fur coat, which went for $US33,600, slightly above the $US20,000 to $US30,000 estimate; and a black wool jacket by the Japanese master Yohji Yamamoto, which sold for $US66,000, more than three times its high estimate of $US20,000.

The coats all came from RoseMarie Terenzio, who was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s executive assistant and publicist, and one of the couple’s closest confidantes. Bessette Kennedy and her husband died in a 1999 plane crash on their way to a wedding, along with Bessette Kennedy’s sister Lauren Bessette.

“It really was like a mini-capsule collection of Carolyn’s wardrobe,” said Lucy Bishop, Sotheby’s handbag and fashion specialist, who organised the online auction. Terenzio initially approached Bishop only about Bessette Kennedy’s leopard coat. “She didn’t wear a lot of print, but the one type of print that she is really known for is the leopard print. That in itself is an iconic piece of her personal style,” Bishop said.

When Bishop visited Terenzio in her apartment, Terenzio pulled out the Yamamoto and Prada coats. “Prada was one of (Bessette Kennedy’s) all-time favourite designers. She wore a lot of Prada, with its classic, simple, minimalist approach,” Bishop said. “She also wore a lot of Japanese fashion, which I find very interesting. And she loved Yohji Yamamoto. You have this wonderful cross-section of her style.”

(Not everyone in the Kennedy inner circle was pleased with the sale. Earlier this month, Jack Schlossberg, JFK Jr. and Bessette Kennedy’s nephew, posted on his Instagram stories an image of a Today show segment on the auction and wrote, “Super creepy if you ask me.”)

A single buyer swept up all three pieces: Sarah Staudinger, the fashion designer behind the Los Angeles-based label Staud and the wife of Hollywood powerhouse and Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel. Staud’s collections often feature earnest homages to the vibes of 1990s fashion, such as the colourful belly-baring ball skirts seen in the 1995 Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped or Gwyneth Paltrow’s green Donna Karan outfit in the 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations.

“I plan to treat these pieces with the same reverence a devoted basketball fan would a Michael Jordan championship jersey,” Staudinger said in a text to The Washington Post. “As a lifelong vintage collector, I’ve always been captivated by CBK and the influence she had on fashion and culture. Owning this part of history as a designer is my version of an NBA all star jersey.”

The same style of Prada coat is now for sale on eBay for $US7,000. That would put the power of the Bessette Kennedy provenance - or CBK, as she has come to be known among her sartorial followers - at 10 times its value otherwise.

While some garments are worth a lot because they come from a historically significant collection or are made by a great designer, such as Christian Dior or Karl Lagerfeld, these three are relatively unspectacular.

“These are not standout pieces,” said Sunita Kumar Nair, who published the first book on Bessette Kennedy’s style, “CBK: A Life in Fashion,” last year. “They were just owned by Carolyn. But that is her mystique: She was fashion chemistry working at its best. You think if I buy that coat, I’m going to be her. But it’s actually about her - the woman, confidence.”

“There is a lot of fashion out there that doesn’t hold any value,” Bishop said. “A lot of designer fashion, for example: Contemporary fashion, once it’s bought from the store and you walk out with it, it typically loses value. Where things get really interesting at auction for fashion is when the clothing has been worn by someone of note, a historical figure, such as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. That can make a huge difference to the value, and it will often add on a couple of zeros to the end of the price achieved.”

Bessette Kennedy’s style has set off a frenzy in fashion, particularly since the publication of Nair’s book. Bessette Kennedy, who was a fashion publicist, is on the mood boards of countless brands, whether the upscale and aloof New York brand Khaite or the Instagram-happy wellness line Sporty & Rich. “She is the fashion icon of the 1990s,” Bishop said.

“She had a utilitarian way with luxury,” Nair said. “She put her expensive handbags on the floor, and her Birkin was stuffed with her gym clothes.”

Other pieces in Sotheby’s Fashion Icons sale also achieved record prices - a reflection of the growing importance and appeal, especially among young collectors, of the high-end vintage or archival clothing market. Bishop said that lots had an average of seven bidders - “which is very high” - and that more than 50 percent of the buyers were new to Sotheby’s and more than a third younger than 40.

The star lot was a matching cloche and scarf by Sonia Delaunay from the mid-1920s, which sold for a whopping $US156,000 against a high estimate of $US24,000. Delaunay, an artist who worked across painting, sculpture, furniture and fashion, was the recent subject of a retrospective at the Bard Graduate Center in New York that included these pieces. That probably boosted interest - a museum was the winning bidder - and the fact that very little of Delaunay’s fashion output is available.

Another standout was a gold Alexander McQueen dress from the designer’s Fall 2007 collection, which was estimated at a more modest $US7,000 to $US12,000 and sold for $US114,000. Bishop said that price reflects the historic importance of this particular dress, from a collection made in homage to McQueen’s ancestor who was accused of witchcraft and executed in Salem, Massachusetts. McQueen’s work skyrocketed in value after his death in 2010 and a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the following year, and has not reached such prices since, but this dress is an exception: “We curate our sales very carefully,” Bishop said.

Vintage and secondhand clothing continues to overtake the appeal of new runway pieces, as sites such as theRealReal, Vestiaire Collective and Poshmark make reselling designer apparel simpler and acquiring designer goods more affordable.

“You can buy a piece of vintage Balenciaga for a couple thousand dollars, which, when you compare that to the prices of contemporary fashion, it’s really remarkable,” Bishop said. (A new Balenciaga gown, by designer Demna, can sell for more than $US5,000.)

It’s a mindset that Bessette Kennedy would have embraced, as a lover of off-piste fashion choices, although Nair, who did not know Bessette Kennedy but spent months immersed in her sartorial mindset, thinks she would have found the sale (and her book) silly.

“She was extremely private. And I think if she were doing something like this, it would have been done in a very different way, in not such a predictable way,” Nair said. “This is the thing about fashion magic that people miss. Repeating magic - it’s just not magic anymore.”

© 2024 , The Washington Post