On September 21, 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette married in a quiet ceremony on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, surrounded by around thirty of their closest family members and friends. Among those in attendance was Gogo Ferguson, a jewelry designer and longtime friend of the couple who had played a central role in bringing their hush-hush nuptials to life. Ferguson grew up on the island and moved back in the late 1980s after attending art school, and when Kennedy and Bessette expressed their desire to host their wedding there—and for Ferguson to design their rings for the ceremony—she didn’t hesitate. “John was a dear friend, so I agreed to help with their wedding at my family’s inn on Cumberland Island and I designed their gold wedding rings,” Ferguson says. “We could give them one precious thing and that was their privacy.”
While the couple is widely remembered for their tragic deaths in a plane crash just three years into their marriage, JFK Jr. was already a well-known celebrity by the mid-nineties. A lawyer, journalist, socialite, and the son of President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, he proposed to Bessette—then an executive for Calvin Klein and a fashion icon in her own right—with a sapphire and diamond band allegedly inspired by one of his mother’s everyday rings, which she called her “swimming ring.” When Ferguson began creating the wedding band, she looked to Bessette’s signature minimalist style. “They both wanted something very, very simple,” Ferguson says. “[Bessette] loved simple designs, and she didn’t need much because she was so beautiful.”
Still, Ferguson had one rule when designing jewelry, then as now: “I’m not interested in doing just a plain wedding band. That’s not adventurous at all,” she says. “It has to be something from Gogo and something from nature.” Her pieces have included armadillo shells, shark vertebrae, and sea urchins, all inspired by the wildness of her home.
For the Kennedys she designed matching gold rings cast from the rib of a rattlesnake and inscribed with their initials and the wedding date, which paired beautifully with the champagne slip dress by Narciso Rodriguez that Bessette wore at the wedding. Even in the bustle of Lower Manhattan, where the couple lived together, and in the ever-present spotlight of the paparazzi, the nature-inspired rings could remind them of their low-key, joy-filled weekend beneath Cumberland’s live oaks.
Today, Ferguson still crafts custom rings for couples, working closely with them to decide which metals to use or whether to incorporate family stones. (Her own wedding ring, too, melds heirloom and environment; a rattlesnake rib wraps around a diamond from her great-great-grandmother, Lucy Carnegie.) And while she also designs necklaces, bracelets, pendants, and even tableware, there will always be something special to her about wedding bands. “It’s really heartwarming—whether it’s John and Carolyn or anyone—when someone comes to me because they appreciate my designs enough to incorporate it into something they’re going to wear for the rest of their lives.”
