Photo: Courtesy HBOMax
The iconic Versace dress almost became a bedspread. Carrie wore a hidden tutu to Big’s funeral. And six identical outfits were purchased for the vomit scene.
And Just Like That…, the new Sex and the City series from HBO Max, has fans defending Steve and ogling Manhattan real estate like it’s 1999 all over again. And perhaps more important than the sex, the city, or the celebrity is the style. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) are older and wealthier. Their closets are bigger, and their hips more brittle. What would the gals wear 18 years after the original series’ final episode? Nancy Pelosi–esque monochrome coats? Tie-dyed sweatsuits? Eileen Fisher?
“Coming out of the pandemic and quarantine, I really didn’t want to see Charlotte drop off the kids at school in athleisure,” Molly Rogers, the costume designer for the series along with Danny Santiago, told Glamour. “The content of the show is very real. They’re dealing with marriages and deaths. I wanted the clothes to be as uplifting—give people eye candy like the original show always did. That incensed some people!”
Rogers could easily be a beloved character on And Just Like That…. She worked on Sex and the City since the original series’ early days, alongside original costume designer Patricia Field, whom Rogers also joined on The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty. Describing the AJLT costume department, Rogers said, “We had two things: ice cream and drinks.” A scene where Nixon’s outfit matched a tablecloth drove her “cuckoo-nuts.” And when AJLT showrunner Michael Patrick King nixed her idea for Carrie to wear a hat in the finale, Rogers wrote him a poem that begins, “Where is his body? They ask me.” (She jokes that she’s going to get revenge with a hat line called And Just Like Hat.)
Rogers broke down 10 of her favorite fashion looks from the series. The vintage gems, the Net-a-Porter finds, the custom Fendi, and a shoe that Sarah Jessica Parker nicknamed Phyllis. Read on for what Rogers calls, in a whisper, “hat drama.”
Carrie’s funeral outfit
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That was a beautiful vintage dress that Danny brought out of his archives, his warehouse in Miami, where he has things that he’s collected for 30 years. Lillie Rubin was the label inside that dress. It just had enough of that element of Carrie with the crinoline under it to be kind of a tutu, but still somber.
There’s that line of dialogue where she says she kind of dressed for Mr. Big. So it needed to have a little twist to it, which was the hat. That’s such a classic silhouette. We were going to do something really unusual to it—we had this old, distressed panel of flowers and we shoved them up under the dress in the front where the dress lace parts like a curtain. It was stunning. And then we read the script again and she says, “I said no flowers.” We were heartbroken.
Carrie’s “I love Central Park” sweatshirt
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Everybody loved that sweatshirt. I found it at Reformation. One Sunday morning I was having coffee and walked past the one on my block—they have really good vintage sweatshirts and really good prices. Not all of their stores have this little stash of vintage, but the one on my block in New York does.
S.J. cut the neck out of the sweatshirt, cut the sleeves where the ribbing is, and rolled them up. For me that outfit was classic Carrie. She has on a vintage dress that has sequined dragonflies or something on it. It has this train in the back so it’s very la-di-da.
The iconic Versace gown
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Do you remember when she goes home from the comedy club and sleeps at the apartment and doesn’t have a duvet so she pulls all these archived clothes out and puts them over her as a duvet? That was supposed to be that Versace gown that was used as a blanket. They moved up that scene and shot it in August. All of Europe is on vacation in August, and we couldn’t get anyone to get off the beach to go into the Versace archive in some warehouse far outside Milan. We told the producers, “We can’t get our hands on it.” So they said, “We’ll put it in the closet scene.”
Versace keeps it in their temperature-controlled space, and we just ask for it when we need it. It’s in a big crate—I think someone flew with it. Sarah Jessica does not want that dress on a hanger because it stretches out. You saw how she carried it in the scene like a dead body. And so we leave it on the floor. It’s like, “Oh! Don’t mind that couture in the corner—it’s just over there on a rug!”
Carrie’s day-out look
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Danny and I were both down at our homes in Miami Beach, and the producers gave us two weeks to prep. We were like, “Let’s go shopping.” What you do here in Florida is you get in your car and get on U.S. 1 and you go right up the coast to Palm Beach, which is where a lot of New Yorkers retire. You just drive your car up U.S. 1 and you go, “There’s a thrift store! There’s a vintage store!”
I found that dress in Palm Beach. I thought it was fab—that ombré color. And Sarah Jessica was like, “Let’s do a straw!” She looks so good in hats. We pulled those Miu Miu lizard shoes out of her archive. She ran to the stock market [in the original series] in those shoes, I think. Those were great—they were chunky and that dress was really thin and narrow, so it was kind of like wearing a slip.
The Fake Scene
I have not gotten to talk about this like I’ve wanted to. This was a fake scene that was supposed to throw people off the scent of what we were actually shooting that day. The code word for it was “The Black Event,” which was Mr. Big’s funeral. They wanted an outfit to throw off the paparazzi.
We had this black-and-white polka-dot Carolina Herrera vintage skirt with a classic Capezio leotard top, and we had this feathered hat, which I was insisting on because I knew the internet would go bonkers if she threw another bird on her head. S.J. was a little squeamish about doing it. People could not figure it out. They thought maybe they were renewing their vows. I was sad the outfit wasn’t in the show—it was one of my favorites.
Carrie’s clubbing outfit
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“This is one of my favorites—that dress was so beautiful on her. It’s a satin vintage cheongsam. One Saturday Danny and I decided to go to a warehouse that someone had invited us to—it was dusty, it was tough, we looked on every rack, and that’s where I think we found that dress. It had no label on it; I think it was $24. She was going to wear it without a jacket, and then it was 32 degrees outside in that nightclub exterior, and she was like, “I can’t make it.” We threw her rum raisin jacket from the movie that she wore when she met Aidan in that restaurant. We were using a lot of silk, oversized blazers on her. The pockets are deep—I love pockets, I can’t live without them. And you know, it looked slouchy and cool, and her teeth didn’t chatter.
The bag that she carried with that outfit was a Fendi bag that they especially made for her. They called us and said, “What color would you like?” We took the Pantone paint strips to S.J. and she said, “Let’s do like a raspberry fuchsia to really pop in the nighttime exterior.” It’s a nice custom piece. And that was the only time that she wore a long earring.
Carrie’s bodega tutu look
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It’s really classic Carrie to grab a crinoline, throw a sweater on top of it, and roll out the door. The funeral dress also has a crinoline under it, and she wears basically a tutu bedroom slipper when she’s coming home from the hospital and the hot bread guy is carrying her up the stoop—there’s a crinoline puff on her foot.
I think that’s a real marker for Carrie: “I’ve got something flouncy on, I feel good in that, it’s making me feel better at the funeral, or coming home from the hospital.” It’s a staple.
Carrie’s first-date outfit
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We had a meeting when we read that script and I instructed the shoppers: “She’s gonna vomit in this dress. Now go out in New York and find six of anything you can.” So they ran around town finding six jackets, six shoes, six purses! Because we were told it was gonna be really gruesome. I was in the office on Net-a-Porter and saw this Norma Kamali dress and knew it was body-conscious and perfect for going on a date. We got six of them. S.J. tried it on and she goes, “It’s just too long for me.” So we shortened it.
And it worked! We never used the other five. She never messed up the dress. They’re hanging in the storage. And the jackets. And the shoes. We actually only had one of the bags because I found it in Paris at the Paco Rabanne showroom; it was a snakeskin chainmail. The jacket was a white silk Max Mara jacket that was oversized. And the shoes, I want to say, were our go-to summer shoe, which was Aquazzura, these tiny little crystals of different colors. They just look great on her foot. In the night scene they just dazzled.
The “Adult Carrie” outfit
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That’s one of my favorites—the saturated colors of that turquoise and emerald? I don’t even think you can call that emerald; it’s such a mix of green. That was our tribute to Yves Saint Laurent. That blue blouse was a vintage YSL. The color block of that was incredible with that blue flower wallpaper in her apartment. That was grown-up Carrie, I thought. It was simple but strong, dramatic, and her hair was loose and wavy. Adult Carrie.”
Carrie’s at-home look
All that is vintage. You can’t tell, but that beautiful colored weird blue jacket she has on literally has rips and shreds in it because it’s so old. I was like, “Are you really going to wear that on television? It looked like an animal got into a fight with it!” And she was like, “Yeah, I think it really adds to its character.” S.J. likes to look at everything we bring in.
She doesn’t bypass anything. But there was just one instance—it was a vintage shoe, and on the inside of the foot it had the designer’s name which was Phyllis something. She and Danny were always trying to set Phyllis with an outfit; they loved it. It was a cute shoe, but we had that whole story about “Get me back into high heels.” I kept saying, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t put Phyllis with that outfit!” And they kept saying, “We love Phyllis!” She wears it in one scene where Charlotte takes her to physical therapy. So she got to get it in. It needed to have its moment.
Originally published in Glamour.com
