Kobe Bryant bought Carrie Bradshaw's famous 'Sex and the City' dress for Vanessa — costume designer Patricia Field is glad it brings her 'joy'
Vanessa Bryant’s closet has some serious Hollywood street cred. During the February memorial for her late husband Kobe Bryant, the former NBA star’s widow revealed that he had bought her a blue dress worn by Rachel McAdams in the 2004 tear-jerker The Notebook as a romantic, and very rare, gesture.
Now it emerges that Vanessa is also the proud owner of the vintage green tulle-skirted dress worn by Sarah Jessica Parker for Carrie Bradshaw’s whirlwind Parisian adventure in the final episode of Sex and the City. According to an Instagram post contrasting Parker’s 2004 scene and the real-life gown now living at the Bryant home, the iconic outfit was again a gift from the late Los Angeles Laker.
“I love you my baby,” Vanessa said of her husband, who was killed in a January helicopter crash alongside their 13-year-old daughter Gianna and others. “I found this beautiful dress Kobe gifted me a long time ago. Not going to lie, I was taken aback with emotion. He was SO romantic. Still showing me he loves me from heaven.”
In her caption, she noted the dress’s significance in the HBO show’s final scenes, “When Mr. Big comes and gets Carrie back. Paris. Missing my boo-boo and my sweet girl. So nice to have found this dress today. You set the bar so high baby. No love like REAL LOVE.”
Bryant had previously spoken about being a fan of the series, and actor Ron Livingston confirmed during a 2018 appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers that the star athlete had once approached him at a Lakers game by saying, “Berger?” — a reference to the Post-it-dumping cad he played.
Bryant couldn’t have picked a better dress. While Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe was the envy of all, the actress who played her singled this green number as the best of the bunch.
“I think I loved the tutu dress that I wore at the end of the Paris episode because it was an outfit that was about an image that Carrie had, which was, like so often happens to Carrie, what she wanted to project onto the scenario of wearing that dress, a pie in her face,” Parker told Entertainment Weekly in 2010. “That outfit got to tell so many stories, and it was such a romantic outfit and it was so delicate and it had so much grace to it, and it ran around Paris, and that was not how she had imagined that outfit.”
Vanessa’s post has unsurprisingly impressed many, including Kim Kardashian, who commented, “Wow!!!! This is so special!”
Patricia Field, the famed costume designer who created Carrie’s trend-setting looks, agrees.
“Happy to see this classic outfit bring Vanessa joy,” she tells Yahoo Entertainment.
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