Vivienne Westwood says the fashion in the SATC movie sucked (mild spoilers)

Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood’s wedding gown featured prominently in the Sex and The City Movie. Carrie was gifted the gown by the designer after she wore it for a Vogue fashion shoot. Costume Designer Patricia Field said she chose to feature Westwood’s gown because she found her designs interesting. Both Field and Westwood are older women known for their eccentric sense of personal style and for their bright red dyed hair, but they may balk at people comparing them. From 67 year-old Westwood’s latest remarks, it sounds like there’s some kind of feud brewing between them.

Westwood said that she absolutely hated the fashion in the Sex and The City Movie, which was all hand picked by Field, and that she couldn’t sit through more than ten minutes of it:

Westwood insists she was far from impressed with stylist Patricia Field’s work on the big screen adaptation of the hit TV series.

She says, “I thought Sex And The City was supposed to be about cutting-edge fashion and there was nothing remotely memorable or interesting about what I saw.

“I went to the premiere and left after ten minutes.”

[From WENN via NY Mag]

This isn’t the first critique I’ve read of the fashion in the film. Slate has a good editorial by Julia Turner about how Carrie was too much of a label whore. Turner said it was a departure from the television series, which often mixed in vintage and cheaper pieces with the high end fashion and wasn’t so concerned about designer names.

Although this labelmania is hardly surprising—why shouldn’t a series known for its fantastical clothing recruit and then flatter such heavy hitters?—I found it disappointing. This is not to say the clothes in the film are bad. Many of the outfits are glorious. (I’ll take two of the Miranda-in-therapy suits and one Carrie-buys-a-copy-of-Vogue fedora.) But there are fewer vintage pieces, fewer off-kilter touches, and the movie, with its emphasis on big-name designers, seems to ignore what the show got right about clothes: that dressing up is a way to invent different versions of yourself.

[From Slate.com]

If you saw the film, do you remember the scene when Carrie was modeling the gowns in which she breathlessly named off the designers one by one as if they were Gods to be revered? It was too much, and my husband and I rolled our eyes at each other. Maybe Westwood got annoyed at Field for thinking she was doing her a favor, or maybe she saw early on that the fashion was label-heavy and resented being lumped in with the other designers in the film. It doesn’t matter, though. One salty old fashion queen’s too-late diss will hardly dent the love for this film and for the fashion in it.

Here’s another photo of Vivienne Westwood at “the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation Gala Dinner at Hampton Court Palace in London” on 6/7/08, thanks to WENN.

Published 6/24/08 by


Cele|bitchy

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