Fashion was always on point in Sex and the City. But And Just Like That ... can’t seem to find its footing.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Has Sex and the City lost its fashion sense?
The third season of the HBO Max reboot of Sex and the City –
That is perhaps unsurprising. Despite the groundbreaking accomplished in the original series, each future offshoot has failed to display the same quality. The two films the series inspired, in 2008 and 2010, positioned designer handbags as subjects as revelatory as midlife career changes or falling in and out of love. Will we ever again see media that celebrates style without lionising the rich?
The fashion was always on point, even as the plots and narrative heft thinned. Sex and the City is where costume designer Pat Field implanted an eccentric grit into characters who fluttered down Park Avenue, snarled into boardrooms and refused to settle in romance, even as their fellow single friends married off.
Field put deskbound career women such as Samantha Jones and Miranda Hobbes in Roberto Cavalli and Jil Sander, asserting that busy women should take pleasure in looking good and that shopping was as fun and macho as guys smoking cigars after a hard day’s work. With Charlotte, Field showed how preppy art dealers were flocking to Prada in the early 2000s before many major fashion journalists clocked the trend.
But Field’s magnum opus was Carrie Bradshaw, played by the affable Sarah Jessica Parker. A 2013 essay by the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum proclaimed Carrie as one of modern television’s first anti-heroes. Even through constant reappraisals of the series, Carrie’s style remains one of the most potent influences on the way women think about dressing and designer goods today. There are just as many women on TikTok and running around downtown New York wearing knee-high boots with hot shorts and a vintage boho blouse as there are Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy imitators and West Village girls.
With Carrie, Field used fashion like a missile: a bizarro cocktail dress by Jean Paul Gaultier became a vessel of class anxiety when Carrie clashed with boyfriend Mr Big’s uptown style. A ratty fur coat she wore throughout the first several seasons showed her commitment to a sale-rack sort of glamour: cheap but defiant. A nude dress became a referendum on how quickly men and women should sleep together.
Carrie’s clothing choices were always controversial. She once cinched her bare midriff with a polka-dot belt, and her Vivienne Westwood wedding gown, worn with a turquoise headpiece, is probably far from most women’s down-the-aisle fantasy.
Yet the point was never to look palatable but to show her sense of self. And the show was well aware of her dubious style rap: one boyfriend, “Berger,” famously insulted her fascinator, while an elderly neighbour muttered, “That’s a crazy outfit.”
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Advertise with NZME.The excesses, when the show was good, opened up her character: with no Prince Charming or family money to rely on, Carrie seemed to think that her safest investment was always herself. In one of the most picked-apart arcs in the series, Carrie breaks things off with her fiance, Aiden, and finds she doesn’t have the money for the deposit on her apartment even though she’s spent tens of thousands of dollars on shoes.
You could raise an eyebrow at her, and some of her friends did. But one of the great themes of Sex and the City was how quick we are to judge women – especially single women and ones older than their mid-30s – and how harshly we do so. The purpose of interesting art is rarely to inspire us to offer moral judgments.
Now, the clothes strike many as a disappointment that feels bigger than picking the right or wrong shoe. In the first episode of the third season of And Just Like That ..., Carrie wears an enormous floppy hat, by the milliner Maryam Keyhani, with a vintage dress and Dr. Scholl’s sandals. “The real issue here is unbalanced styling that makes this playful hat look so out of place,” Danya Issawi wrote in the Cut, which was one of several outlets to weigh in on the hat when paparazzi pictures circulated over a year ago. “There is whimsy in that headpiece while the rest of the outfit is simply zany. Keyhani’s hat is serving Surrealism, but Carrie is giving farmers market at best.”
In another scene, Carrie wears a Simone Rocha see-through dress and coat stuffed with roses. While Every Outfit on SATC, a celebrated podcast and Instagram account by Chelsea Fairless and Lauren Garroni, surmised that this is exactly what Carrie would be spending the late Mr. Big’s money on, there is a sense that Carrie is grasping for her style rather than evolving pushing it. Many of Carrie’s looks are less ridiculous than they are simply boring and a little weird, like the sale rack at Anthropologie in late July: a pink knee-length ball skirt and a mint silk top, a beige pleated skirt and beaded top, a weirdly draped distressed denim skirt and fitted beige top. It is the wardrobe of a woman with too much money and not enough to think about.
“To me, the outfits in AJLT are costumes, those in SATC were clothes,” the Cut’s Issawi, who also writes snappy recaps of the show, said in an email. “Carrie’s old outfits were eccentric, erratic and nonsensical, but I understood who she was through her choices. I knew the kind of girl she was: fabulous in a tragic way, indecisive, brash, self-destructive (pointed toe Manolo heels at all times? I know she was her podiatrist’s favourite patient).”
The styling, which in the three seasons of the reboot has been taken over by former Field mentees, is now flat. (Issawi compared the clothes to the outfits on Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.) Charlotte walks her dog in Central Park in a striped lace Gucci track jacket (surely, Charlotte would know Gucci is one of the least cool brands on the planet right now). Lisa Todd Wexley wears a necklace made of enormous straw balls. And Miranda is dressed as the drab office drone fans always resisted her embodying.
Field “drew from the world around her, funnelling her vision into the show,” Issawi said. “In the reboot, there is no sense of a real world to even reference, only make-believe scenarios and make-believe people in make-believe clothes, and I certainly can’t seem to find Carrie anywhere in them.”
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Advertise with NZME.Fairless, of Every Outfit, sees more consistency between the two shows. “Carrie’s fashion sense has always been very eclectic and very much centred around the idea of combining opposing pieces,” she said. “I think when you have that sort of fashion philosophy, there are bound to be hits and misses. When there’s any level of risk with getting dressed, there are the looks where the risk pays off, and then there’s the looks where the risks doesn’t pay off.” Fairless said there is a fantastical quality to Charlotte’s and Lisa’s styling: “It’s heightened in that ‘Emily in Paris’ kind of way.”
What is the line between truly experimenting and looking, well, unstylish? “It’s such a fine line, and it depends so much on the person, right?” said Fairless, pointing to the objective nature of observing personal style. “Sarah Jessica Parker is someone that can pull off a lot of fashion, and has pulled off a lot of fashion historically in a way that other people aren’t capable. And sometimes that kind of style just doesn’t, you can’t transplant it on to someone else. We’re also seeing that with the Carolyn Bessette costumes,” she said, referring to images released from Ryan Murphy’s upcoming show on John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn. The early looks have caused a fury on social media for what many fans of CBK – as she’s now popularly known, following the 2023 publication of a deeply researched book on her wardrobe that appears to have turned many influencers into experts – perceive as inaccurate costumes.
Streaming and platforms such as Substack, Instagram and TikTok have made it easy for us to think that toiling in the nostalgia factory makes us experts on the cut of 20-year-old trousers or the originality of Carrie Bradshaw’s style. It often feels that, rather than creating new things, too many of us are fixated on re-creating the old: old outfits, old shows, old boyfriends. Will a TV show, or a movie, ever give us an aspirational but modern look at how we could dress today?
In another light, the devolution may reflect the frustration many 20- and 30-somethings feel around finding their own sense of “personal style,” as it seems impossible to break out of social media’s homogeneity and the dominance of trend-driven fast fashion.
Fairless summed up her commitment to the show in terms many fans may reluctantly agree with: “Whatever they put these characters in, I am along for the ride.”
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