They hadn’t even started shooting, and Ryan Murphy’s portrayal of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy had already been written off as the biggest crime in costuming since And Just Like That tried to convince us that Carrie Bradshaw owned marigolds – which is interesting, considering CBK should have been one of the easiest to get right. For starters, she was born 150 years after the invention of the camera, meaning there is visual evidence of the clothes she wore before her tragic death in 1999, at the age of 33. She’s also one of the most studied figures in recent pop culture, with entire books and Instagram accounts dedicated to decoding her style. And perhaps most baffling of all: most of her original pieces still exist for prospective wardrobe departments to reference, recreate and even reuse.

There are, in other words, no excuses for this first-look image of An American Love Story to have been put to the internet. In it, the actress Sarah Pidgeon wears a turtleneck, too-short cigarette pants and a polyblend coat so poorly made it looked like it might combust under the studio lights. There are other problems, too: the hair is far too bleached and brittle to recall the “buttery chunks” that Brad Johns – one of the many architects of CBK’s image still alive and available for consultation – created for the socialite. But perhaps the most egregious thing of all is the bag: a lifeless Hermès Birkin 35, when CBK famously carried 40s. A separate post teases two other outfits I can’t be bothered to get into, but has provoked just as much outrage: “She would NEVER put these looks together”, “This is murder”.

And, ugh. Just as I was preparing to make a balanced argument – true style can’t be replicated; these are only test shots; at least there’s a genuine 1995 Spazzolato bag; try squinting – a colleague sent me this. The Converse. The pleather jacket. The satin-effect skirt you can pick up at any high-street chain for, like, £30. It’s obvious this multi-million-pound production isn’t just fudging the details of CBK’s wardrobe, but rewriting her entire relationship with fashion. Which would be fine, maybe, had her clothes not contained so much of her to begin with: the way she’d rip out visible tags because logos were for other people; how she gravitated to Prada’s awkward designs to distract from her own beauty; how she embraced the Japanese avant-garde as a refusal of the bombshell tastes of the time; and how she’d often buy the same piece but in different colours because she was kind of above it all.

Ryan Murphy isn’t exactly known for realism – he is, after all, the same man who introduced Kim Kardashian to acting – but he does have form when it comes to fashion history, and should know better than to skimp on its accuracy. He didn’t put Penélope Cruz’s Donatella Versace in a prairie dress, or Ewan McGregor’s Halston in sweatpants, which makes it almost comical how CBK – that elusive, untouchable paean to chic – has ended up looking so heinous. I mean, I’d have assumed this was a series about a very rude Karen Millen employee, and I’m not even sure Murphy or the costume designers can shoulder the full blame for that. Fashion has been sucking the life out of this dead woman’s image for years, with the whole stealth wealth thing spawning in part from the endless resharing of her photos. The person in that costume might not be the heroine we expected, but it is, unfortunately, the one we all deserve.