As the world has rekindled its obsession with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy this year, Rhode founder Hailey Bieber has locked in on a new It girl to rep her brand: Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Bessette-Kennedy on Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
“Playing Carolyn has been such an incredible experience,” Pidgeon tells me over the phone. She’s fresh off the SAG Actor Awards red carpet and marvelling at this moment in her career – but also approaching it with a lesson she learned from portraying Bessette-Kennedy. “There’s so much to be said about a delineation between your public and private life. When transforming [into Carolyn], I tried to understand her relationship with being perceived and presentation. I learned a lot about what storytelling you can do with fashion.”
Beauty is a part of that storytelling, too. The first time I encountered Pidgeon, I was seeing the Tony Award-winning play Stereophonic, in which she played a singer-songwriter named Diana. Pidgeon was a brunette then (her natural colour), with long, ’70s-style waves. Not long after that, she would go through a whirlwind blonde transformation to become Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Many sessions of bleach ensued.
“When I see photos of myself with brown hair, it feels just as shocking as when I first saw myself with blonde,” she says of her chameleon-like change for Love Story. “But I feel like I’m entering a new chapter of my life, and to come into this with a different head of hair is exciting. My clothes feel different on me with my blonde hair. I’m attracted to different colours now.”
Courtesy of Rhode