The Manhattan look from Sex and the City

It’s been four years since Carrie and co. skipped off into their New York happy endings on the seminal HBO drama. But now they’re back. After endless rumours of in-fighting among the stars and a jump from the small to the silver screen, what can fans expect from the new Sex and the City movie? “It certainly doesn’t disappoint in fashion,” promises Sarah Jessica Parker, better known to the western world as one Miss Carrie Bradshaw, former sex columnist for The New York Star and freelance writer for fashion bible, Vogue.

And it’s just as well, as the outfits of Samantha Jones, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York and their pint-sized pal proved to be one of the show’s strongest selling points. Effortlessly starting fashion trends, be they flower corsages or name necklaces, the raunchy series became a shop window for all of the world’s top designers and helped establish SJP as a fashion icon worthy of her own clothing and perfume range. So, how does the film’s fashion palette match up?

“Everything’s more expensive, more beautiful,” comments Willie Garson, SATC’s Stanford on the step up from a cable TV show to a $65 million Hollywood summer event movie. “There were just, like, tables of bags,” adds Kristin Davis, who reprises her role as the happily married Charlotte. “Every new bag that you haven’t even seen in the store yet, and then there were just tables of shoes and I mean it was just like Mecca.” Clearly over-awed by the amount of costume assembled by SATC’s legendary costume designer, Patricia Field and her team of buyers and stylists, the cast were constantly reminded that the stakes had been raised for this, SATC’s debut cinematic outing.

With the streets and landmarks of New York transformed into a catwalk for every designer from Chanel to Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood to Dior, the film assumes a visual personality, making it a feminine playground akin to the explosive, testosterone-fuelled special effects in more boy-friendly fare. Kim Cattrall, SATC’s resident sex kitten, PR guru Samantha Jones adds: “The purses and the shoes and the jewellery – it’s a real delight for the eyes.”

The film’s writer and director, Michael Patrick King, worried that this new onslaught of expensive labels would diminish the credibility of the characters, but finally conceded that: “Sometimes fashion trumps logic. So for the film, I decided to just go for it.” This new attitude of ‘bigger is better’ meant 81 costume changes for Carrie and approximately 40 for the three other girls.

This massive bulk of wardrobe created a logistical headache, especially since many pieces were imported from all over the globe. “There is so much wardrobe in SATC that I think the main challenge here is just keeping it all straight,” reveals Patricia Field. “It comes from Paris, it comes from Italy, it comes from New York – it comes from everywhere!” And many of the most eye-catching items, (such as Carrie’s Yves Saint Laurent trousers and vest combination as worn in the scene when talking to Charlotte about her running), had to be returned as soon as the cameras had stopped rolling. “The people from YSL were literally standing by the wardrobe truck waiting for me to take it off so they could take it back to Paris,” jokes SJP.

Scheduling outfits might not be de rigour on most film sets, but nothing is simple where clothes are concerned in the land of SATC. And that’s why Field, Oscar-nominated for her design work on fellow fashion classic, The Devil Wears Prada, was on-hand. Not only did the fashion have to be fabulous, but it also had to possess a dramatic weight. It had to reflect the passage of time that had passed since we last saw the girls, almost as a visual cue to off-screen action.

“The fashion is really different,” explains SJP of the evolving looks of the glamorous quartet. “Everything you do you need to do for a reason. It can’t be chaos,” elaborates Field. “So when it came to the movie, I asked myself, “what are we going to do for the seventh act?” I knew the looks had to be heightened, but at the same time the girls couldn’t change from black to white, because the audience knows them too intimately. In the end, we changed them just enough to take the movie in a new, but still familiar, direction.”

On her thinking behind the process, she adds: “I created a story for each of them in my mind. I based their [clothes] on what could have happened to them in those four years. They didn’t change much really; but there are some new elements.”

But while Field felt a responsibility to the characters, she was also keen to remind people that being chic isn’t only for the 20-somethings. “There’s always this stigma about women aging,” she says. “Men can, but women can’t. When a woman ages she loses her coquettishness, but she ripens. What is great about an older woman is that she has more experience, she is more sexy and confident, and her wardrobe reflects that.”

This style manifesto is certainly a stand against those critics that have questioned whether Carrie and co. can still be icons now they’ve hit their forties, but with the film already confounding box office expectations, it’s beyond question. The girls are back – and they’re still looking fabulous.