She wore it like it didn’t matter.

A narrow strip of tortoiseshell, perched on top of a crown of blonde hair.

A simple Charles Wahba headband, purchased quietly from C.O. Bigelow in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, which opened as a true apothecary in 1838.

Now, decades later, there are lines outside C.O. Bigelow again.

Thanks to Ryan Murphy’s ‘Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’, flocks of women are queuing up outside C.O. Bigelow to buy the headband in an effort to “get the CBK look.”

But the truth is, they can’t.

Because what made the headband iconic was not the object itself, but what it carried with it – an association with a specific woman, in a specific time in 90s New York.

Nineties minimalism was not so much a trend, so much as a way of moving through the world. In every photograph the paparazzi managed to steal of Carolyn – whether she was walking her dog, doing cartwheels at the Kennedy compound, or stepping into a gala in one of her Yohji Yamamoto dresses – there was a kind of authenticity that could not be manufactured.

She looked real. Lived in. And her clothes felt like an extension of a life already in motion, rather than something assembled for the masses.

The irony of modern style culture is that, for all its talk about individuality, it is built on replication.

“Steal her look.” “Build her wardrobe.” “How to dress like Carolyn.”

There is now an entire ecosystem dedicated to Carolyn Bessette – curated Pinterest boards and Instagram accounts cataloguing every coat, every skirt, every pair of sunglasses she wore, as though proximity to the object might offer proximity to the woman herself.

What these tributes often pay little regard to is the girl behind the clothes.

Who was the girl behind the tortoiseshell headband?

Carolyn Bessette grew up in sleepy suburban Connecticut, the daughter of a public school teacher. She studied education at Boston University.

Her entry into fashion was nothing out of the ordinary. She started on the shop floor at Calvin Klein in Boston. It was on the shop floor that she began to develop the sense of style that she would later be known for.

She moved into public relations, eventually climbing the ranks to become a senior publicist at Calvin Klein in the 1990s, at a time when the United States had entered into an economic recession and the bold, shoulder-padded excess of the 80s suddenly felt too loud.

Calvin Klein was quietly setting the visual language of modern minimalism. As Lisa Marsh, author of The House of Klein: Fashion, Controversy, and a Business Obsession, says, “Calvin Klein’s era of minimalism was a sign of the times. History remembers this era as one that is an antidote to ’80s maximalism. No one will ever don a simple slip dress without, consciously or unconsciously, saying a little thank you to Calvin Klein.”

In that context, the headband made sense. Simple, yet practical.

Now, search for “tortoiseshell headband” online, and thousands of results appear. But what is being traded is not the headband itself. It is the association with Carolyn’s style.

Which begs the question: how far does the law go in protecting personal style, and more importantly, taste?

Where the law draws the line: why personal style resists ownership

In the eyes of the law, a tortoiseshell headband is unremarkable.

A tortoiseshell headband sits almost entirely outside the boundaries of intellectual property law protection in Australia.

It is unlikely to attract meaningful copyright protection. Copyright law in Australia protects original works of expression, not ideas, not style, and not functional objects as such.

For protection to arise, there must be an original artistic work that reflects independent intellectual effort. A tortoiseshell headband, as a mass-produced, functional accessory, does not readily meet that description. There is no identifiable artistic expression in the object itself that copyright is designed to protect.

It is neither new nor distinctive, and therefore unlikely to satisfy the threshold for registrability under the Designs Act 2003 (Cth) (Designs Act).

Under the Designs Act, a design must be “new and distinctive” to be registrable. A design is distinctive if it is not substantially similar in overall impression to any prior design (the “prior art base”), as judged through the eyes of the informed user. An “informed user” sits between a casual consumer and a design expert.

Viewed through that lens, a tortoiseshell headband is unlikely to meet the threshold. The form is already well established: a slim, curved band, worn pushed back from the face, typically in acetate or plastic. These features dominate the overall impression and have existed in the prior art base for decades. Any variations in tone, finish or thickness are minor and do not meaningfully alter that impression.

And so, dupes circulate freely. Near-identical versions are produced across price points, from fast fashion to boutique labels.

The question, then, shifts to the consumer. What protects them from ordering what they think is a piece of fashion history and instead receiving a plastic torture device?

Under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL), a seller must not engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive, or likely to be misleading or deceptive. Nor can they make false or misleading representations as to origin, endorsement or authenticity.

The prohibition applies even if there was no intention to mislead or deceive. A seller cannot suggest that a product is the same item worn by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, nor imply any form of affiliation that does not exist.

A seller may trade on aesthetic resemblance, but not on false provenance. It may say “in the style of”, but not “as worn by”. But it cannot assert a history it cannot prove. It can invite comparison, so long as it stops short of making a claim it cannot substantiate.

So why then do we still want to buy it?

While Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s headband was never distinctive in design, it was distinctive in context.

And so, you can purchase the headband, wear the black turtleneck sweater and don the mid-calf Prada boots.

But, despite the insistence of fashion magazines and TikTok creators, you cannot “steal her look”.

What you cannot acquire is the thing that made it so coveted in the first place: her taste.

Taste, in this sense, remains entirely unprotected. And entirely out of reach.

Screenshot That is a series by Chloe Mo that explores iconic fashion pieces from film, television and cultural history that live rent-freee in your mind long after the scene ends, and unpacks each item’s cultural significance and the legal issues that sit behind it.

The post On Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy & Identity: The Girl Behind the Tortoiseshell Headband appeared first on Fashion Law Journal.