Did they get anything right here, we ask? “No,” says Sebag-Montefiore, politely. “Although, I guess they are both suits.”
But the most glaring issue, in Sebag-Montefiore’s eyes, is not the fit of the jacket or the inaccurate weight of the fabric—it’s the lack of full-chested commitment. Kelly’s suit has hints of JFK, a subtle head nod to the original in the lapel gorge or a slightly more padded shoulder, but it’s only leaning halfway.
Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin
“It’s neither one thing nor the other,” he says. “I think the problem, for me, as a suit, it’s not cohesive. It sort of has an eye on the past, an eye on these [historical] suits, without actually getting to what they’re about.”
Maybe it’s a natural consequence of the series itself. We’re not talking about a gritty Hollywood drama destined for a Cannes Palme d’Or and a 27-minute standing ovation. American Love Story is an FX series for Hulu. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the Hulu generation has no reference point for JFK Jr., canon Sexiest Man Alive and wearer of custom Armani suits, whose status in the menswear community remains godlike.
“It’s a very Netflix-ed, streamer, glossed-over version of it, which is digestible by people whose reference points might be Suits,” says Sebag-Montefiore. “If you put that next to Harvey Spector, then from Harvey Spector, it is significantly in that [’90s] direction, right? If that’s the person who you’re communicating to, and that’s their point of reference, then it does make sense. But putting it next to [John F Kennedy Jr.], it doesn’t have anything of the same feel, and the charm, and the expression that Kennedy had. That whole boxy, loose, oversized ’90s thing.”
Sebag-Montefiore posits that—despite all the pearl-clutching from menswear purists—the tailoring anachronisms might have actually been intentional. “Some of the job of working with a good costume designer is finding the right place for the project to pin historical accuracy versus communicating the character to the audience,” he says. “A lot of these costume people know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re doing it on purpose.”
A version of this story originally appeared on British GQ.
