The Tamesis
Note: This story contains spoilers for episode four Love Story: John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Caroline Bassett.
Episode 4 love story The film opens with two teenage girls stealing a poster from a phone booth and giggling as they snatch a nude photo of Kate Moss. They ran down the street and fled the crime scene as John F. Kennedy Jr. walked by.
The poster is based on a Calvin Klein perfume advertisement from the early 1990s, which reads “Obsession for men.” In this episode, Bessette and Klein discuss the intense attention the event brought to Moss. In real life, as on the show, it was an advertising campaign that became iconic, transformed Moss’s career and helped usher in the fashion era of “heroin chic.”
Early in Ryan Murphy’s new series, viewers watch Carolyn Bessette pick Kate Moss’s headshot from a pile of slush in the Calvin Klein office. It was a striking moment: Bessette showcased her innate sense of cool and single-handedly convinced designers to include the young model.
In fact, Bassett didn’t “discover” the model quite in the way the show suggests. However, she did support Moss in the brand’s controversial 1992 underwear ad, in which she appeared alongside Mark Wahlberg (then known as Markey Marks). Based on the book by Maureen Callahan champagne supernovaEvery towns and villagesBassett and artistic director Fabian Baron convinced Klein that the then-unknown Moss was just the face he needed at a time when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. They were right: The success of the lingerie and fragrance lines would ultimately help save the company.
As for the story behind the 1993 “Obsession” event depicted in the show? At the heart of the story is another love story: that between Moss and her then-boyfriend, photographer Mario Sorrenti.
Klein told this story to interviewexplaining that Moss told him about Sorrenti, Klein asked to meet him and see his portfolio. “I looked at the pictures and it just became obsession to me – he was obsessed with her,” Klein said. The feeling is mutual. In 2017, Moss reflected on their relationship with Ellersaid: “We were young and passionate and it was my first love. This love will never happen again, really. I was obsessed with him.”
