The Carrie dress

Nicolaia Rips on a Big quest with inconclusive results.

Google search “Carrie Bradshaw dress.” The results: an assembly line of tight but slouchy mid-thigh boat or crew neck numbers. Somehow with TV’s most imitated fashion girl the algorithm knows exactly what I’m imagining––Carrie, resplendent, knocking on the window of a restaurant in a pair of aviators and strappy golden heels and…a gray dress. It’s understated despite being bodycon, loose enough to be flattering, sheer enough to hint at impropriety, long enough to sit on the subway without your bare butt touching the seat. The outfit is simple by SATC standards but satisfying, the ideal summer outfit. It's a dress that appears on every best of SATC outfit roundup from Vogue to Elle to WhoWhatWear. It's the dress that’s launched a thousand dupes and, according to my civilian detective work, remains unidentified despite constant TikToks, years-long reddit threads and unending copycats.

It’s a dress I decided to find.

Naturally, this meant spending an embarrassing amount of time camping out on the first floor of the Seward Park complex that houses the latest venture of Patricia Field, sartorial doyenne of SATC, Academy Award winner, the woman responsible for the most memorable Hollywood fashion since Edith Head and the costume designer who selected that cerulean sweater for The Devil Wears Prada.

ARTFashion Gallery is “comprised entirely of original made-to-order, handcrafted pieces by a select group of artists, curated by Field and sold exclusively at www.patriciafield.com.” It’s a dayglo shrine to Field’s irreverent taste, unfortunate emphasis on the shrine. Tucked away from Dimes Square, reportedly in the co-op Field lives in, ARTFashion gallery is not a place that gets passersby. What does ARTFashion mean? Why is ART being yelled at me? Does shouting art in a crowded store generate anything other than panic? The name is a dated reference to a debate that nobody seems to be having. Art is fashion and fashion is art.

The ARTfashion sold in the store is also expensive—a Tom Ford-era Gucci bamboo handle bag can be found on TheRealReal for a fraction of the price, though there’s some more affordable but kitschy jewelry. Of course, this dichotomy is essential to the deliberately high/low philosophy of styling at the core of the Patricia Field aesthetic.

After showing up to the store every week for a month, Patricia Field’s kind but forgetful assistant expressed admiration for my journalistic sensibility. “One day when you’re older you’re going to be a really good reporter,” he told me with the kind of grace one gives pre-pubescents before a pat on the head. This felt both amazing and terrible as I’ve been a working writer for years, but I took the compliment and Field’s direct line. I started to feel like I was on a scrapped episode of SATC.

So, the bad news: Field doesn’t remember where the dress was from and neither does Molly Rogers who assisted on SATC and now costumes And Just Like That…Also, “there’s no records for that episode anymore.”

Anyway.

Reformation, the sartorial equivalent of a Sweetgreen (good enough for the office but never great) has plenty of iterations. LA apparel has another affordable dupe though the fabric looks cheapo. And I don’t care how cool your kid is, if you’re putting them in this SSENSE kids Rick Owens dress YOU deserve to be bullied. But on an adult…

Now, based on the time period and the designers that Field favored, I offer you the likely candidates: This Helmut Lang option that’s close but no cigar. The Norma Kamali Pickleball dress. And finally, this Michael Stars tank dress. Michael Stars, how I love you.

Allow me a moment to return mentally to ARTFashion Gallery, because I won’t return there physically again: the reason that ARTFashion doesn’t work is because Patricia’s done too well influencing how the average girl thinks about dressing and that girl, the girl who Patricia raised, wouldn’t shop at ARTFashion––a place that is so serious about why and how you should wear something. That girl would also know that the quest for the dress is pointless. What matters here is not the label but the fit and the styling of the shoes and the bag and the essence of summer it all projects, a carefree somnolence that only comes from getting too much sun and having too much sex. In this case, the brand of the gray dress is kind of immaterial, it’s the material of the girl wearing it that’s material!

The Dirt: Maybe the real dress was the observations we made along the way.

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