'Sex and the City' Reboot Clothes: Same Waist Belt, Different Era
'Sex and the City' Reboot Clothes: Same Waist Belt, Different Era
And just like that, tutus for day are back.
Today, young people plan their lives around things like reversing global warming and enacting social justice. Back when I was a teen in the aughts, I was like, I love Sex and the City. New York, here I come.
Oh, how times have changed.
But such was the cultural force of SATC at the time. It presented a fantasy of adulting that involved working as a freelance columnist while living solo in a Manhattan apartment with designer clothes bursting out of the closet, and never really having to hustle unless you were late to brunch. It was all the things that print magazines taught young women at the time were good and important: clothes, being slim, girlfriends, and working sort of. (I do not wish to diminish what it did for women on television and the then unheard-of complexity it offered to women characters, but I’m primarily focused on how the show used fashion, here.)
As a teen, I don’t know what I imagined — that I’d land in New York and Carrie’s real estate agent would materialize like a fairy godmother, and with a bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, ensconce me in what one could only describe as a “chic pad”?
Instead, the real world issued me a big fat LOL. The two twin beds in my NYU dorm room were so close together that they would have made mince meat of one of Carrie’s tutus had she stumbled through after a night of drinking in the Meatpacking District, hungry for a laptop. But no one wants to see that on TV. We liked our tutus intact then — but is that what we want now? The Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That will have to answer that question.
A major appeal of the old show — what made it, for many people, escapist and wonderful — was fashion that smacked of unrealistic and unabashed materialism. This felt somewhat earned because the characters were mostly doing life on their own without male support, which was then revolutionary on television. It screamed: Just look at the fab stuff you can have and do as a self-made upwardly mobile woman in NYC! This is partly why the show has in many respects not aged so great post-recession, and why its fourth life as And Just Like That could be as poorly received as the second SATC movie. That was the one, you may recall, where the women go to Abu Dhabi, and, Roger Ebert wrote in his review:
Samantha is arrested for kissing on the beach, and there's an uncomfortable scene in which the girls are menaced by outraged men in a public market, where all they've done is dress in a way more appropriate for a sales reception at Victoria's Secret. They're rescued by Arab women so well covered only their eyes are visible, and in private these women reveal that underneath the burkas they're wearing Dior gowns and so forth. Must get hot.
But we’re in the streaming age, no number of TV shows is ever enough, and so the show is coming back. It has new characters, but no Samantha, because Kim Cattrall is, like many fans, done with the show.
So we’re left with a fab three instead of the fab four, who, the show’s description reads, “navigate the journey from the complicated reality of life and friendship in their 30s to the even more complicated reality of life and friendship in their 50s.” They wear costumes from the current era that remarkably could also have come from 20 years ago. They are not styled by Patricia Field, who did the original SATC, because she decided to instead work on the second season of Emily in Paris; production took her advice to hire Molly Rogers, who worked with Field on the original show.
This new show seems to present a fantasyland where athleisure doesn’t exist. And no matter how gloriously unfathomable the apartments are, that’s not necessarily a place I dream of going?
Let’s take a closer look at the fashions of each character. (And if you’re looking for jokes about any cosmetic medical procedures these women may have had, bark up another tree, because I have found all that ageist and — given this is still an industry where most women probably have to have this stuff done to be deemed worthy of roles — unfair.)
Miranda
If you were corporate and had to dress like it every day, you could absolutely do worse than Miranda, who has cast aside her blouse and red hair the same way we’re all dreaming of throwing out our face masks and tiny purse Purells. But she’s still a serious woman, which we can tell because she wears capital S Shirts, but isn’t so serious those Shirts can’t have prints.
This is surely the shirt version of what all of her clients in this fantasy world want from their lawyer: legal binders in Pinterest-y rainbow colors, depositions with whimsy. And if viewers want otherwise, there are Ally McBeal reruns.
Charlotte
Charlotte is the woman for whom adult-sized sleeves are pouffed. She’s as feminine as a floral centerpiece at a woman’s luncheon, emphasis on the eon, because these sleeves don’t just go to lunch — they go to events. We have floral knits, full scarlet-red skirts, and a dainty purse perhaps made from beautiful dream catchers instead of sturdy sides. It’s the handbag of someone who hasn’t forgotten she used to work in art galleries but can also definitely afford to lose her iPhone.
This mom takes her daughter to skateboard wearing an outfit and holding a coffee seemingly specifically designed to prevent her from running after said daughter in a panic should she fall. It is a type of mom so divorced from reality that I wish I was her (that done hair!) as much as I wish I wasn’t her (her podiatrist’s number is definitely in favorites).
And when life calls for a cocktail attire, this Charlotte reaches for sassy one-shouldered turquoise paisley, and yet another pair of perfectly coordinating heels.
This Charlotte loves a matchy-match shoe the way nineties heartthrobs loved frosted tips. It’s guilt-free fashion that shouldn’t be, from a time when sustainable probably just referred to how long you’d be able to stand in a pair of shoes.
Mr. Big
In case you didn’t know He Is Still Virile, he’s rolled up his shirt sleeves to flaunt his forearm hair. He’s also got virility’s best accessories, a bulky-ish watch and a lit cigar. If it weren’t for the hour clearly being sunset and his hair clearly not having had its bourbon yet, you might mistake him for a groomsman during last call.
Carrie
There has always been sort of a swishy breathlessness to Carrie’s clothes and I’m feeling that here once more. The tote bag above is probably the reusable kind she carries around to buy three-packs of toothpaste from Duane Reade, which might be the most modernized thing about her wardrobe.
This Carrie remains committed to a beautiful yet impractical shoe, a bold print, and great hair that never has to read “I’m the primary on the health insurance.” She has also committed to unnecessary hats! You know Kate Middleton is sitting in her palace looking at the @andjustlikethatcostumes Instagram feed and just tapping save save save.
I realize these are fun, but I couldn’t help but wonder (sorry): who is the woman who lives in NYC and wears these hats? I am pretty sure, pandemic or not, this woman would be spending many of her daytime hours in Alo Yoga and Lululemon. A more “real” Carrie would wear a unitard, wedge Isabel Marant sneaker, and top it with an extravagant designer faux fur coat.
This Carrie switches from stilettos to chunky platforms when she has to, I don’t know, open the stock exchange?
She’s extravagant in the unthinking way one used to be able to enjoy consumerism generally.
The question is whether this will all be wonderfully escapist once the show comes out or the last reason for any college-age young person to move to NYC. I suppose if you wanted to go out to a nightclub, you might wear something like the below nowadays — but based on what we’ve seen so far, I’m guessing this is how Carrie dresses “down” for a first class flight to Paris.
All that said, there was something slightly comforting about the return of this waist belt, which used to be everything, in the way Harry Styles’s hot pink Pangaia sweatshirt (“fashion’s favorite hoodie,” quothe Vogue.com) is now everything.
I’m not sure we’re living in a moment when fascinators will create that same iconic magic or just remind us that this show isn’t something anyone asked for. It is surely a reminder that the place of fantastical fashion in our post-pandemic lives remains very much uncertain.
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