CFDA Awards 2021 The Best Dressed Celebrities on the Red Carpet

 

The industry can fully celebrate its accomplishments the night of the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. Dubbed the “Oscars of fashion,” the event acknowledges the artistic achievements of the designers, creative directors, and innovators who keep the business relevant. Given the premise of the evening, the dress code encourages the exceptional (Rihanna’s glittering naked dress, anyone?). Still, forays into camp territory are rare. Instead, the ease and elegance that have made American sportswear stand the test of time serve as guideposts when guests plot out their looks.Even when their outfits are bursting with color and overflowing with detail, the people who stand out at CFDAs honor the codes of American style. Tonight the pack was led by fashion icon award recipient Zendaya, who, in a vibrant Vera Wang crop top and matching skirt  showcased why she’s the youngest person ever to take home the prize. Host Emily Blunt dazzled in a sherbet tone Christopher John Rogers suit while Ashley Olsen brought The Row’s austere minimalism to the red carpet, making 2021’s ceremony one of the most interesting to date. sarah Jessica Parker is making the bed: With her back to me, she pulls the under sheet taut in swift, practiced gestures, fluffs up the pillows, and spreads the comforter just so, before stepping back to observe her handi­work. Suddenly sensing that I’ve entered the room, she whirls around and smiles. “Oh, hi!” she says. “I’m sorry, I just had to straighten up here.” Despite her glamorous looks—her blonde hair pulled back in a sleek bun and her full-skirted vintage dress worn over a leopard-print button-down, all accessorized with a pair of high, glittering block-heel pumps, a model from her SJP shoe line—she seems more than anything a diligent, efficient mom making sure things are under control at home. (“That bed thing is so her,” the Bravo host Andy Cohen tells me later of his good friend’s conscientiousness. “That bed needs to get made, and so she’s going to do it.”

 

 

Parker, however, is not at the West Village town house that she shares with her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick, and their 12-year-old twin daughters, Tabitha and Loretta (the couple’s son, James Wilkie, recently left home for college), nor is the bed her own. It belongs to Carrie Bradshaw, the character Parker has been most closely associated with throughout her career. It is hard to overestimate the iconicity of Sex and the City, which ran on HBO for six seasons, between 1998 and 2004, and later yielded two movie sequels. For a generation of women, the show almost single-handedly defined, in ways both poignant and comedic, distressing and dazzling, what it means to navigate the challenges and triumphs of friendship, love, and career, through the interlocking stories of four best friends in turn-of-the-millennium NYC. “It was a show about glamorous women who often find themselves in unglamorous situations, and about how that’s not the end of the world,” the actor and writer Tavi Gevinson tells me. “Watching it in high school gave me my first glimpse into adulthood, into womanhood, into what it’s like to live in New York.”And now, we have a new chapter—And Just Like That…, a 10-episode sequel series that has brought Parker, once again, to Carrie’s beloved one-bedroom, rebuilt on a set at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. The show, which is due this month on HBO Max, and on which Parker is an executive producer, has been greeted by SATC fans with an anticipation approaching frenzy. Returning will be Parker, as the freewheeling, ambivalently independent freelance writer turned podcaster Carrie; Cynthia Nixon as the no-nonsense attorney Miranda; and Kristin Davis as the winningly prim stay-at-home mom Charlotte. (Kim Cattrall, who played the lusty PR maven Samantha, is the only member of the original foursome who will not be reprising her role, having fired some shots at her former costars online in recent years, in what the tabloids have characterized as a “feud.” “We have some new people, and we have some people who aren’t back anymore,” Parker says diplomatically.) Since shooting began in July, details about the new series have been kept under tight wraps, with a vigilance more usually accorded to Top Secret state files. This, of course, has only stoked public excitement: TikToks and In­stagrams of the actors shooting on location have been analyzed with a kremlinologist’s dedication. Does a scene for which some of the extras are dressed in black suggest that a main character would be killed off, and if so, who? (Samantha? Carrie’s husband, Mr. Big? Her former paramour, Aidan?) “I’m going to leave you very unsatisfied,” Parker says, friendly but firm, when I attempt to prod her for details. When I call Michael Patrick King, a producer and writer of SATC who has now returned to showrun the new series, he is similarly mum. “I’m not going to tell you because I also wouldn’t tell you what I got you for Christmas,” he says. “You can see the package, and it’s gorgeous. Why would I ruin the surprise?”

 

 

 

Fair! And yet, I am lucky enough to be allowed into the inner sanctum—the set of Carrie’s apartment, surely the dream of any SATC enthusiast. “Wait, you get to actually be inside her place from the show? That’s crazy!” my daughter’s babysitter, Lyla, exclaims when she hears the news. At 21, she is part of SATC’s younger demographic, barely born when the series first aired, who have grown familiar with it via streaming. “Every time we shoot on location, maybe 50 women wait at the end of the day to say hi to the ladies, and they’re all between the ages of 25 and 30,” King tells me. “Fourteen-year-old girls walking the dog with their dads call out to me, ‘I can’t wait!’ ” Parker says. “I think young women still really relate to this story. It’s about finding friendships that matter, looking for work that fulfills you, and pursuing love, even when it drags you, bloodied, down the street.”Lyla, in any case, has the right idea: There is something irresistible and a little dislocating about being in a real-life space that I have watched so many times onscreen. Barring the studios’ open-roof plan, and the sounds of frequent drilling and sawing from nearby sets in progress—“There’s a lot of magic here, but also a lot of really hard work,” Parker says—I feel for a moment as if I’m on the Upper East Side, or at least its TV version, and that Parker might settle down at any moment, perhaps wearing something fabulous if a little odd (men’s briefs? A hunting cap? A velour tube top?), light up a cig, and tap out one of her famous “I couldn’t help but wonder”s on her laptop.At this point Parker’s story is a familiar one. One of eight siblings from Cincinnati, she began performing as a child, moving to New York and working onstage and onscreen as a jobbing actor for years, before achieving real stardom as Carrie, in her mid-30s. It is also a truism to note how different she herself is from her SATC alter ego. Parker has none of Carrie’s caution-to-the-wind willfulness and changeability: She’s unfailingly, sincerely gracious. (“Sarah is one of those people who never forgets anyone,” Cohen says.) She’s curious and thoughtful. (“Soon after we met, she asked me what Nepalese food tastes like,” her friend, the designer Prabal Gurung, who was raised in Kathmandu, tells me. “And two days later, I get a phone call, and she says, ‘Let’s go,’ and picks me up to go to a Nepalese restaurant in Queens. In 12 years in the fashion industry, no one else has done that for me. She’s the sort of person who really sees you.”) She never curses, preferring to use “stinking” or “freaking” instead of their stronger counterparts, and sprinkles her speech with old-timey expressions (“Thanks a million!”).