The woman who found Carrie’s tutu in a $5 bargain bin
Pat In The City
Patricia Field
Fourth Estate €18.99
★★★★★
WHEN she was rummaging in a five-dollar bin of clothes in New York and plucked out a crumpled white tutu, Patricia Field had no idea that she was about to create a popculture moment.
The then fiftysomething boutique owner and stylist was merely doing what she had already made a successful career from: picking out an outfit for a New Yorker who wanted to be noticed. That the person was a fictional character called Carrie Bradshaw, the sex-columnist heroine of a risqué new show on HBO, didn’t make things so different.
Even more than the sex scenes and witty one-liners, that ensemble of tutu and pink vest, worn by Sarah Jessica Parker (above) in the opening of Sex And The City, the mega-hit series on which Field made her name, is what everyone remembers.
According to this short, breezy memoir, even the showrunner, Darren Star, didn’t realise how important its costumes would be. But as soon as the series began in 1998, the idiosyncratically dressed Carrie became everyone’s most fashionable friend. ‘Viewers tuned in with excited anticipation to see what unexpected get-up their favourite gals might be in,’ writes Field.
As a twentysomething journalist working on a fashion magazine at that time, I can vouch for that. S&TC launched trends we all adopted – oversized silk flowers as brooches, gold name necklaces, kitten heels and jeans.
Manolo Blahnik owes a lot to Field, and as for Fendi? Field’s account of how she was directly responsible for turning the Italian brand’s ‘Baguette’ bag into an ‘it-bag’, leading to the Fendi family raking in €790m from its sale to luxury goods company LVMH the following year, ends simply with: ‘I never got a thank-you note.’
In fact, Sex And The City is a mere interlude in 81-year-old Field’s years at the cutting edge. The (still) flaming redhead had been in fashion retail for three decades by the time she became a name.
Her three New York City boutiques helped people find their image – whether that was Britney Spears or Beyoncé or, before that, Patti Smith, Boy George and Madonna.
Field’s fashion knowledge was acquired not in the ateliers of Paris but at her mother’s dry-cleaning business on the Upper East Side. With matter of-factness, she relates her early life – her dad died of tuberculosis when she was seven, under traumatic circumstances she recalled in the recent pandemic. She found her homosexuality undramatically and enjoyed long-term relationships for 35 years with beautiful, independent women who adored her fast, freaky lifestyle until they didn’t any more. Field was nominated for an Oscar for her work as costume designer for The Devil Wears Prada and recently worked on Emily In Paris, another show that attracts adulation for its costumes. Frustratingly, there are next to no images of any of the shows or films in the book, but Field’s story is colourful enough, and in a world of homogeneity it’s a reminder of the importance of keeping things weird – and never walking past the bargain bin.