There have so far been three tragedies to And Just Like That…: the departure of Sara Ramirez’s identitarian stand-up comic Che Diaz; the exiting of Karen Pittman’s Columbia Law School professor Nya Wallace; and the total disappearance of Miranda Hobbes. I was reminded of this fact when I came across an image of Cynthia Nixon ascending an escalator in a sad-looking, plaid blazer and a cumbersome brown rucksack in the reboot’s first series. Hobbes’s life has always been an exercise in self-suffering – spending an entire trip to Atlantic City working her way through a pile of New Yorkers and ordering the same Chinese takeaway for months on end – but never had she looked so haunted, so emphatically un-Miranda. This was the woman who wore Miuccia Prada’s seminal spring/summer 1996 collection to her legal offices and Christian Lacroix skirt suits to brunch and Jil Sander shift dresses to collect phone numbers in local bodegas. A briefcase, yes! But a rucksack…?
James Devaney
I’m aware that there are more obviously egregious fashion moments in And Just Like That. (Like Carrie’s babushka scarves and rubber gloves and Carrie’s woven berets and Carrie’s accidental homage to Eliza Doolittle.) But all that is to be expected from the Sex and the City franchise, wherein clothing has always been a vehicle for entertainment. But where costuming once felt like a deepening of these character’s lives – laying bare the chasm between who they were and who they aspired to be – the costumes in And Just Like That… have lent further into comedy and spectacle: huge Valentino gowns for New York fundraising galas and huge Valentino gowns for throwing your husband’s ashes over a bridge in Paris. It has produced some visually stimulating television, a salve arriving in the form of Sarita Choudhury’s Seema Patel: a 54-year-old real estate merchant with a barrel brush blow dry and three iPhones. We don’t know where she has been or even where she is going, but there are lines around her eyes and she wears full terracotta looks as warm as her Sobranie-burnt vocal cords.
Here is a selection of the best – and most berserk looks – to have surfaced within And Just Like That… so far. (Not including a photograph of Aidan in his cinch-waisted Barbour jacket.)