Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy's Faux-Leopard Printed Double-Breasted Coat, Circa 1969

RoseMarie Terenzio, Executive Assistant to John F. Kennedy Jr. and close friend of the couple. This coat was personally gifted to RoseMarie by Carolyn. 

One day in 1996, RoseMarie was contemplating what to wear for a first date that evening with a 'good looking media pundit'. Discussing the date over the phone with Carolyn, she was summoned by her to the couple's Tribeca loft. RoseMarie, who was 27 at the time, recalls: 'Whenever I would be going out on a date, Carolyn would say 'What are you wearing? Come down and we'll pick something out for you to wear'". She fondly describes Carolyn as her 'fashion fairy godmother'. Bessette-Kennedy puled the eye-catching vintage faux-leopard coat from her closet and urged Terenzio to try it on, proclaiming: 'It looks perfect on you. You should keep it. I've been photographed in it so many times [the media] are going to start making fun of me". Terenzio didn't keep the 'good looking media pundit' but did keep the coat, treasuring it for the past 25 years. She recalls that during those years in the mid to late 1990s she became the envy of George magazine staffers after Bessette took her under her wing: “People in the office were jealous. They’d say, ‘Oh, she’s trying to look like Carolyn.’ And who wouldn’t want to look like her?" Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is photographed wearing this coat, walking with her husband John F. Kennedy Jr., in 1995 or 1996. This image is reproduced in ‘Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy: A Life In Fashion’ by Sunita Kumar Nair, p. 144 (mis-dated as 1999). RoseMarie Terenzio is also photographed wearing the coat, walking next to John F. Kennedy Jr, in 1996.