After an inauspicious start involving test shots of Sarah Pidgeon carrying the wrong-size Birkin, Love Story — the FX show about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s romance — is now streaming. And it’s a hit, having frothed up a massive new crop of Gen Z fans of Carolyn’s style. Though the CBK look made a bit of a comeback during the stealth wealth boom of the early 2020s, images of her iconic wardrobe had mostly previously been confined to mood boards of designers and fashion students. Now, thanks to the show — inspired by Elizabeth Beller’s page-turning book, Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy — you can’t escape it.

Fans had little faith in Ryan Murphy, Love Story’s executive producer, to get it right after those test shots that looked all wrong came out last summer. It didn’t help that, between then and now, he released All’s Fair starring Kim Kardashian, one of the worst-reviewed television shows in modern history (Back Row podcast guest Sophie Gilbert wrote in the Atlantic, "You simply can’t make something this bad without intention…"). Nor did it help that Bessette’s hair colorist went out of his way to tell Vogue that actress Sarah Pidgeon’s dye job was basically an affront to the entire fashion industry: “If you show that on TV and fashion people see it, they are going to think, why the fuck is she all ashed out with her hair only one color?” Social media quickly reached a general consensus that the clothes were giving Aritzia. So Murphy replaced the costume designer, promised to hire a vocal subset of influencers who document CBK’s fashion as a hobby as advisors, and the filming went ahead.

Murphy never seemed to have hired those influencers, and many still seem unhappy about the show for various inaccuracies — as though this was always supposed to be a documentary instead of Murphy's signature camp suggestion of reality. Mixing the influencers into the crew was a buzzy talking point, albeit a strange idea to begin with — since when should professional costume designers outsource their work to people running Instagram fan accounts? Besides, as we know from a long history of the fashion industry being inaccurately depicted on-screen — two Devil Wears Prada movies, Ugly Betty, Emily in Paris — accuracy is not the key to success. Playing to an audience of fashion people is not the gateway to a mass hit. Creating a fantasy of their world is, and this production team has done just that, from the no-food-or-color-allowed Calvin Klein office to the male model serving champagne at dimly lit, otherwise forgettable parties.

Rudy Mance, who took over costume design from Leah Katznelson, worked with specialists to source many of the exact pieces Carolyn wore. Is it perfect? No — I still contend that CBK is impossible to capture. No one looks quite like her, insouciance can’t be replicated, and we have so little documentation of her compared to public figures these days that she will forever remain an enigma. But this is a work of fiction, not a history textbook. Mance and the hair and makeup team did a great job creating the overall effect of her look — minimalist clothes, painstakingly tweezed ’90s brows, the wild and voluminous hair that both Beller and Sunita Kumar Nair, who wrote a book about her style, describe as Carolyn’s signature.

And the haters have been drowned out by the fans. Countless websites have published CBK and JFK Jr. "get the look" affiliate slop. CBK and JFK Jr. starter packs are floating around Instagram. Guys are mimicking JFK Jr.’s style (one TikToker dressed as CBK posted a video “transforming my husband into JFK Jr from Love Story!!!”). Countless girls are copying her style and flipping their hair the way Pidgeon does (I found this parody of her sexy-girl gesticulations to be on-point). TikTok has never been home to this much black business casual. Dylan Carlino said in a TikTok that has 1.4 million views, “I don’t know if we’re supposed to be watching it because of, like, ethics and stuff and if it’s, like, disrespectful, but I will say… I needed something to watch, you can’t be mad at me Jack Schlossberg. I don’t know him, I wish I did, he seems so cool. The show is so fucking good.” (After Schlossberg, JFK Jr.’s nephew, accused Murphy of "profiting off his family’s tragedy in a grotesque way," Murphy said his reaction was "an odd choice to be mad about your relative that you really don’t remember" — a comment The New Yorker critic Doreen St. Félix called "amazingly mean.")

The initial Birkin kerfuffle and Schlossberg coming out against the show seems to have only worked in its favor by ginning up massive interest. When I watch the show, I actually find myself liking Pidgeon’s thick, long, multidimensionally-colored, sometimes-wavy hair more than anything she wears. I complained to a friend that she did a distracting amount of acting with the mop on her head, and he said, “I’d have a hard time not playing with it myself.” Touché!

Fashion people who lived through that era are loving it. I didn’t live through it, but my favorite scenes take place in the Calvin office, where Bessette apparently had to measure the distance between shoes displayed in the showroom. Bessette started out working in a Calvin store in Boston before getting plucked to work in the corporate office in VIP relations, where she dressed JFK Jr. and then moved on to the publicity department. Liz Goldwyn, vintage collector and author of the Starf*cker newsletter, told me she’s been “mainlining” the show. She was living in New York attending the School of Visual Arts and working for Fabien Baron, Calvin Klein’s creative director, around that time. “I did not wear black and did not dress minimalist, and I used to get in trouble when they sent me to Calvin Klein to drop things off because I would be wearing pink, or some 1940s dress,” she told me. “Everyone wore black, gray, beige, and white.”

Alessandro Nivola — a terrific actor of stage and screen — plays Calvin, and though I’ve heard his depiction described as not exactly how Calvin really was, I’m not sure it matters. Many have probably seen video clips of Karl Lagerfeld or Valentino walking and talking. But how many people have a concrete idea of how Calvin Klein really talked or behaved? Kelly Klein, played by Leila George, also has a terrific minimalist wardrobe and looks stunning in all her scenes. The details about how Calvin wouldn’t allow any paper clips except black ones or any flowers except white orchids or for anyone to eat food in there is exactly the kind of Devil Wears Prada stuff people have an endless appetite for. Some have taken issue with the depiction of Calvin’s relationship with Carolyn — “she DID NOT discover Kate [Moss],” one Redditor noted — but again, does it really matter in a work of fiction? The point the show makes — which is an accurate one — is that Calvin adored her, and she had great instincts about visuals, publicity, and marketing.

The show’s appeal extends far beyond the wardrobe. When was the last time you went out without a cell phone with the feeling that anything — maybe even something magical — could happen to you? (Like falling into bed with an eight-packed underwear model or JFK Jr.?)

“It's such a dumpster fire now, and we have access to so much. I think people are really nostalgic for analog,” said Goldwyn. I’d argue that people are also nostalgic for mystery. JFK Jr. could run around NYC shirtless all the time and ride his bike like a plebe and people didn’t get sick of him — he was just part of the fabric of the city. If he and Carolyn had gotten together today, they would have been TikTok’d to death like Alix Earle touching Tom Brady’s arm at that St. Barths New Year’s party. The fandom for Love Story shows how eager people are eager to fill in the gaps that Deux Moi never will. We may never have celebrities like that ever again, and Love Story and books like Beller’s help keep the idea — and our collective fantasy — of them alive.