"Ryan Murphy's series about the doomed love of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette has certainly sent West Village girls to C.O. Bigelow for Bessette's tortoiseshell headbands, but the same is true for Panna II. The show is equal parts a fairy tale about the era's cityscape and interiors. Some of the sets were built to be mostly true to life - like Jackie Kennedy Onassis's apartment at 1040 Fifth, which was based off interiors shot for a Sotheby's catalogue of her estate."
"A note that Ryan gave very early on was that he wanted the show to kind of be a showcase for '90s minimalism. DiGerlando spoke to us about bringing in 'period correct' chairs for the Odeon, the two distinctive eras of Calvin Klein's minimalism, and sprinkling in some of what Kennedy really did own - from a crystal skull to George Washington's sword."
"Trying to re-create the city just of that time was filtered through my memory. We used a restaurant, Panna II - there's no direct evidence of them having eaten there that I know of - but that's a place that I ate at when I lived down there. It's not like the high-echelon restaurants that some of the other scenes took place in, but if you lived in New York City at the time, you knew that place and you've eaten there."
Production designer Alex DiGerlando created sets for a series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette that blend historical authenticity with stylized fantasy. Some locations, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis's Fifth Avenue apartment, were based on actual Sotheby's estate catalogues. Others, including Kennedy Jr.'s loft, drew from real floor plans but were largely invented. The show presents 1990s New York as a sanitized, fairy-tale version of the era, featuring period-correct furnishings and minimalist design elements. DiGerlando incorporated personal memories from her time at NYU and living in downtown Manhattan, including details from restaurants like Panna II. The production balanced authentic Kennedy family artifacts with creative set design to capture the aesthetic and atmosphere of 1990s minimalism.
Read at Curbed
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]