It's the hair you notice first. That particular weight of dark brown, pushed back but never locked down, running just long enough to suggest a man who understood the difference between groomed and fussed over. Then the jawline. Then the walk—long-strided and hands pocketed like he was late for something better. America's most enduring heartthrob was never trying to be one, which is precisely why the label stuck.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. was born on Nov. 25, 1960, two weeks after his father won the presidency, and entered the national consciousness three years later, when he saluted the coffin outside St. Matthew's Cathedral. He grew up under the longest lens in American life, which followed him first from boarding school, then to Brown and to NYU Law, after which he failed the bar twice before passing on the third attempt. He worked as a Manhattan assistant DA, a job that paid him less than the paparazzi earned photographing his commute. In 1988, People named the then-27-year-old the Sexiest Man Alive. In 1995, he launched George, a politics-as-pop-culture monthly that proved he was serious about building a life beyond bloodline. A year later, he married Carolyn Bessette, a Calvin Klein publicist whose minimalist instincts mirrored his own, in a secret ceremony on Cumberland Island, Georgia. When the Piper Saratoga he was piloting, with his wife and her sister Lauren Bessette as passengers, disappeared off Martha's Vineyard on July 16, 1999, he was 38.

More than a quarter century later, the fascination has not dimmed. Ryan Murphy's "Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette" premieres Feb. 12 on FX and Hulu, with newcomer Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon stepping into the marriage the tabloids couldn't leave alone. But Murphy's nine episodes chart the spectacle and the tragedy, and the clothes were always telling the story first. The blazer-and-khaki uniform. The rolled sleeves. The old-money ease stripped of old-money rigidity. His wardrobe never chased a decade; it just kept showing up, correctly, until the decades came back around to meet it.

Before the salute, before the mythology, there is just a boy on a boat. Kennedy, two years old and already wind-tousled, grips the wheel of a speedboat off the Cape in a white polo with red piping and matching red shorts—the Kennedy compound uniform, handed down through cousins like sailcloth.

JFK Jr., not yet three years old, skips alongside his father after a Veterans Day ceremony, dressed in a child's version of formality: white shorts, a cardigan and sturdy shoes built for a toddler's rambunctiousness. His father's dark suit anchors the frame, disciplined and presidential, while the boy pulls forward, impatient with stillness. It is the earliest evidence of a........

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