And Just Like That costume designers on bringing back THAT dress in season 2 premiere
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season 2 premiere of And Just Like That.
And just like that... something old became something new.
Carrie Bradshaw's Vivienne Westwood wedding dress, the one actress Sarah Jessica Parker wore in the first Sex and the City movie, made a return appearance in the season 2 premiere for And Just Like That, which dropped the first two episodes on the Max streaming platform Thursday. EW spoke to costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago about the "delicate" garment and how they went about keeping it in good condition all these years.
"I'm scared to death of it," Santiago says of the bird headpiece, specifically. "I was like, let's make a stunt-double blue bird and just use that one because you're pinning it into a hairdo for hours."
Craig Blankenhorn/Max Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw unearths a one-of-a-kind dress in the 'And Just Like That' season 2 premiere
So why did Carrie's old gown get resurrected? Smoke (Bethlehem Million), the fashion designer wife of Carrie's former podcast bestie, Jackie Nee (Bobby Lee), was tasked with making the author's Met Gala dress, complete with a cape. The good news: The cape was complete. The bad news: The stomach flu had been going around the NYC seamstress community, and she wasn't able to complete the dress in time for the big day.
The other good news: Carrie had another dress in her closet that she could wear with the cape instead. The other bad news: It was her wedding dress, the one she wore when her late husband left her at the altar. But Carrie got over it, and out came the dress for one walk down Carrie's apartment steps in the premiere episode.
And Just Like That showrunner Michael Patrick King informed Rogers and Santiago that they would need to bring the wedding dress back last summer. "We reached out to Vivienne Westwood early before we were even prepping, to just check in and make sure it hadn't been destroyed or misplaced," Rogers says. "We didn't know. It's been quite a while."
James Devaney/WireImage Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw in her wedding dress in the 'Sex and the City' movie
The feather headpiece alone was extremely delicate. According to Rogers, it arrived in its own small vintage suitcase, all wrapped in tissue paper.
"I remember when we first had it back for the movie, they had said that feather was about 120 years old, that it's from a Victorian piece or something like that, that came from an old hat," he explains. "So even at that time, it was something extremely fragile. It made it through all of that filming, and here we are, this many years later."
As for the dress itself, Rogers notes they had to have it cleaned and refit to Parker. "It had been in storage for such a long time," she says, "but it came out in great shape."
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