“Carrie Bradshaw has always pushed the envelope with hats,” says Lauren Garroni of fashion/pop culture podcast and Instagram account, Every Outfit. “But this is by far, the most insane thing she’s ever worn.” Her Every Outfit partner Chelsea Fairless – both are self-titled “Sex and the City historians” – agrees: “To wear a hat of this magnitude on the streets of New York borders on performance art.”
“It’s hard to imagine the thought process behind the costume design,” explains Garroni, “apart from the fact that Carrie is an eccentric dresser. Perhaps they wanted to up the ante fashion-wise this season? But I don’t think that they were going for a specific look, because no one dresses like this. It feels a little Strawberry Shortcake or Holly Hobbie-adjacent, but those are such abstract references.”
Some digging from detectives from the fashion world at the time revealed that the hat in question was a €450 (£379) piece called Head in the Clouds from the artist Maryam Keyhani, which she notes on her website is: “only for the brave and sensitive”. Keyhani told The Guardian that she felt “pure pride and joy” in Carrie wearing the hat on screen, adding “she looks like she’s completely disregarding what mainstream culture tells her – her inner world is much more important than that of the outside world”. Perhaps as a response to The Cut’s criticism, Keyhani added: “It’s the freedom to look totally unhinged if you want to – and as women, at a certain age we truly don’t care what people think of us – as long as we feel right about it!”
The thinking behind the look
So how did one of Carrie’s most controversial looks come into fruition? The whole outfit is the creative vision of And Just Like That…’s costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago. And while it might look like the results of random rummage through a thrift store; the pair drew from Carrie’s life and the planned events of series three to construct her wardrobe choices.
“There is a major plot point that heavily influenced Carrie’s style this season,” Rogers tells the BBC, mindful of spoilers for the 12-part series. The first big news for Carrie is that she has decided to move from being a sex-memoir author into a historical romance novelist – “romantasy”, her editor begs her to pivot to, to be on trend in the publishing world – so perhaps she’s looking to Jane Austen or Brontë sister bonnets for inspiration in her new novel-writing era.
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