On a fall day in 1998, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy stepped out of her Tribeca loft in a camel Prada coat, blue jeans and a slicked-back ponytail to walk her dog, Friday. A paparazzi photographer caught the moment, and the image has been circulating on mood boards ever since.
Twenty-eight years later, that coat sold at auction for $192,000, more than six times its high estimate and a world record for any garment connected to the late style icon. It’s one of just seven authenticated pieces from her wardrobe ever to come to market — a remarkably small number for one of the most obsessed-over closets of the 20th century.
The full sale, handled by The Fashion Auctioneer, brought in $408,750, with every single lot finding a buyer.
But unlike the massive, public estates of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or Princess Diana, CBK’s wardrobe — from the Narciso Rodriguez wedding dress that reshaped bridal wear to the engagement ring JFK Jr. slipped on her finger — remains a tantalizing mystery.
Where it all ended up, who legally inherited it, and whether any of it will ever resurface are questions that have never been publicly answered — though estate law, it turns out, offers some surprising clues.
Every one of those seven pieces so far was originally gifted to RoseMarie Terenzio, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s longtime assistant and one of the couple’s closest friends. Terenzio — the author of “JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography” — has called Bessette Kennedy a “fashion fairy godmother” who would size up a friend’s date-night outfit and say, “Come down, and we’ll pick something out for you.”
“It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, that would look good on you,’” Terenzio tells Page Six Style. “It was like, ‘You’re gonna feel so good in this.’ She wanted you to feel good in your clothes. She always inspired confidence in people.”
That generosity extended well beyond her inner circle. One Christmas at George, the magazine JFK Jr. founded, Bessette Kennedy researched every staffer’s interests, style and hobbies and bought each person an individual gift. One colleague who had recently gone vegan got a juicer; another with a boho sensibility received a faux fur handbag.
Lucy Bishop, the auctioneer who handled the recent sale, tells Page Six Style she first tracked Terenzio down years ago after recalling an old interview in which the former assistant mentioned owning some of Carolyn’s clothes.
Terenzio says she parted with pieces she no longer wore in the hope that they’d find an appreciative home. “If somebody could enjoy it and remember her, then that would be a good thing,” she tells us. She donated a portion of the auction proceeds to Hearts of Gold, a nonprofit supporting homeless mothers and their children.
The two camel Prada coats in the sale — including the record-breaking lot — weren’t actually in Terenzio’s possession; she had passed them along to another close friend, Michele Ammon. But she does still have other items Bessette Kennedy gave her — though she’s protective of the details.
“I don’t want to name what I have, and I don’t want to say where I keep them,” she says.
Bessette Kennedy’s wardrobe, by all accounts, was tightly edited.
“She didn’t have this giant, expensive wardrobe. She had a closet,” Terenzio says. “If she bought a cardigan at Prada, she was wearing it over and over again.” She was just as likely to hunt for T-shirts in the Gap’s kids’ section or browse Pearl River as she was to shop at Yohji Yamamoto or specialty stores like Charivari, Bagutta and Linda Dresner.
“Carolyn could be sentimental about a plastic ring you bought her at a flea market, and she would treasure it because you thought about her and it came from you,” Terenzio says. “It wasn’t really about a price tag. It was more about just her spirit.”
The four pieces originally gifted to Terenzio weren’t the only lots in the sale. Twenty additional vintage garments came from an anonymous collector, who acquired them from an eBay seller in 2017. That seller claimed they were originally obtained from a staffer at JFK Jr.’s magazine, George — but Bishop has been unable to verify the chain of custody, and says so in the auction catalog.
Those pieces do have another claim to fame, however: Several were loaned to the hit FX series “Love Story,” and worn by Sarah Pidgeon in her role as Bessette Kennedy.
The provenance gap didn’t seem to matter to many buyers, either: A Prada skirt and boots estimated at $2,000 to $3,000 sold for $30,000.
Bishop tells us the sale drew interest from around the world: “It really was a mix between fans and fashion-loving women, but also really serious private collectors, museums and institutions.”
The appetite for Bessette Kennedy’s wardrobe has been building for years; designer Sarah Staudinger, founder of the fashion label Staud, purchased three CBK pieces — a black Prada coat, a vintage leopard-print coat and a Yohji Yamamoto jacket — at Sotheby’s in 2024 for a combined $177,600, according to WWD.
Still, all of this combined barely scratches the surface of a closet that has been studied and coveted for more than a quarter-century. The Calvin Klein pieces from her years as the brand’s star publicist. The Manolo Blahnik heels. The Birkin. The Levi’s 517s. And above all, the wedding dress. The question of who ended up with the contents of the couple’s Tribeca loft has never been publicly answered.
JFK Jr.’s will, signed in December 1997, left all of his tangible property to Carolyn — on the condition that she survive him by 30 days. Because the couple died simultaneously in the July 1999 plane crash, his belongings passed to the next beneficiaries: Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg’s three children, Jack, Rose and Tatiana.
Carolyn’s belongings, however, are a separate matter — and they almost certainly didn’t go to the Kennedy side at all.
“Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg had no legal relationship with her sister-in-law,” Herb Nass, a trusts and estates partner at Davis+Gilbert LLP, tells Page Six Style. He has reviewed JFK Jr.’s will but did not represent any of the parties.
Press reports from the time confirm that Bessette Kennedy died without a will. Without one, Carolyn’s estate — including her personal wardrobe, her engagement ring and any other belongings in her name — would have passed to her next of kin under New York intestacy law: her parents, Ann Freeman and William Bessette, in equal shares.
“The engagement ring — she owned. He gave it to her,” Nass says. “That would have passed as her property, not back to the Kennedy family, but would have passed to her intestate distributees — her mom and her dad.”
In other words, the most likely path for Carolyn’s closet leads not to the Kennedy compound but to the Bessette family. Freeman died in 2007. William Bessette, now in his early 80s, has never given press interviews. The only surviving member of Bessette Kennedy’s immediate family is her older sister, Lisa Bessette, 61, who lives a determinedly private life in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Lisa’s stepfather, Richard Freeman, told The Post in 2019: “We never cooperate with the media, no interviews, no questions, and that is still our position.”
It’s a family that has made clear it wants to be left alone — which may explain why the wardrobe has never materialized.
Bishop argues that whoever has the pieces should be consulting an expert regardless of their plans for them. “Even if they may not wish to sell the pieces, they will likely need an insurance valuation,” she says. There is also the matter of caring for the pieces correctly, which takes specialized expertise.
The market — supercharged by “Love Story” — only makes that case more urgent. Bishop, who previously handled Princess Diana pieces at Sotheby’s, has watched that market soar. A decade ago, the average sold price for a Diana piece hovered around $50,000; now, she says, it’s closer to $1 million.
As for the Narciso Rodriguez wedding dress — the piece any auction house would consider a career-defining consignment — Bishop is hopeful but realistic.
“I think the wedding dress is a very important item to American fashion history,” she says. “I would imagine the family has it.”
Terenzio agrees. “I’m sure it’s being very carefully cared for, whoever has it,” she says.
Bishop says it would be a dream to help advise on the piece one day: “I think it’s unlikely, but you never know.”
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