It was in season two, episode 15 of Sex and the City that Carrie Bradshaw looked her best. The columnist had just called it quits with Vaughn Wysel—a well-bred novelist played by Justin Theroux, who suffered from an outsized ego—and so she took a walk of freedom around Manhattan, those equine limbs framed in a skin-tight tank dress with strappy stilettos and aviators.
It was a simple outfit by SATC standards, but images of Bradshaw maniacally rapping on the windows of a downtown restaurant—where Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte were perhaps enjoying a rare moment of peace—have since become a cornerstone of Instagram moodboard accounts. And yet no one knows where the look was from. Braver journalists than I, such as Nicolaia Rips, have attempted to track down the ensemble, even visiting the Seward Park complex that houses ARTFashion Gallery—costume designer Patricia Field’s concept store—to get an ID. But unfortunately neither Field nor Molly Rogers, who assisted on SATC and now costumes And Just Like That remembered its origins. There are no records, and Field’s team was known to have taken a wonderfully ham-fisted approach to pulling in clothes, making it all the more impossible to locate such an inconspicuous dress.
Oh well. EmRata wore something similar last night while attending a screening of Blink Twice: a taupe minidress bracing at just the right point of her thighs, open-toed heels, a torque necklace and a diminutive shoulder bag. “Famously not demure, famously not mindful,” the model, who has authored a book on what it means to be objectified, captioned a TikTok in response to a stranger taking it upon himself to yell, “Put a shirt on!” in her direction. Carrie Bradshaw would have doubtless dedicated an entire article to just how retrograde that interaction was. “I got to thinking… sometimes it’s the elusive dress in our closet – the one whose label we can’t quite trace—that reminds us there’s a power in embracing the parts of ourselves that refuse to be pinned down.” Etc.