And for the Grand Finale of Carrie Bradshaw Month (2)…. one of my favourite ever Carrie outfits!

But first… this story starts with a coincidence. It’s often tough to find things in charity shops when you have something specific in mind. I had been looking for pinstripes for quite some time, but they had been eluding me, until I found this:

It’s pinstripe material! It’s so rare to find material in charity shops here that I grabbed it and ran to the cashier as quickly as possible. This was in the PDSA shop in Whitby and I paid £2.49. The original label was still attached, telling me that the fabric had originally been bought at a shop about 50 yards away on the same street and that it had cost £3.50.

Unfortunately, the label couldn’t tell me what the material was made of, but I’m guessing wool-mix.

Here’s the coincidence part. After searching for pinstriped stuff for so long and striking gold at PDSA, not 5 minutes later I came across these babies in the Scope shop, which is practically next door!

They are mens pinstripe suit trousers and they are 100% wool. I paid £7, which is rather a lot. They were carrying a label which proclaimed them to be especially high quality.

Of course, I had the pinstripe material in my hand from next door so I was able to compare them in the shop, and happily, they are a very decent match (better in real light than in the photo below).

The outfit I had in mind is the absolutely fantastic suit worn by Carrie when she goes for her first meeting with her new editor at Vogue! This is a personal favourite for me and I was delighted to finally have the chance to attempt this.

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Readers, despite my diligent searching over the last 6 months, it turns out it is actually incredibly hard to find a tutu in a charity shop in this country. Who would’ve thought, eh?!

So I had to resort to a vintage shop to find this baby… £14.99 from Rag n’ Bone in Deptford.

I’m sure you all know what I have got in mind for this…

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OK, so this jacket doesn’t look like it has heaps of potential, but bear with me!

The swing tag is missing, but I paid £4.99 in the British Heart Foundation in Whitby.  It’s Marks and Spencer, size UK 20, so plenty to work with.

For this remake I will also be using…

…one large full-skirted light grey skirt. This one is size 16 and came from the Children’s Society Shop in Upminster. For this I paid £2.49.

So, what could kind of outfit could be drawn out of these two unusual garments? Read on to find out…

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This is the third post in a series I’m doing about Carrie Bradshaw. You can read the rest of the posts here.

One of my favourite moments in Season 2 is in episode 18. Carrie and the girls discuss how her relationship with Big has parallels with the 1973 movie “The Way We Were“, starring Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. She heads over to the Plaza hotel where Big is leaving his and Natasha’s engagement party and the rest is a total pastiche of The Way We Were. She even tells him, “Your girl is lovely, Hubbell,” not that he gets the reference, of course, before getting back into the limo and driving off with ‘the idiot stick figure with no soul’.

In this scene she wears a beautiful silk slip dress, cut on the bias, which I read somewhere is by Christian Dior.

The dress is really, really low cut. You can see underwear peeking through the neckline in a lot of the shots.

To make a dress like this, I needed something white and cut on the bias… enter this yucky skirt!

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This is part two of a series in which I pay tribute to everyone’s favourite fictional fashionista. To read the other posts, click here.

For my next project, I chose this red and white skirt from season 4 episode 7. The location is ‘Scout’, Steve and Aidan’s bar in SoHo.

The skirt is Prada spring 2001 RTW and it was also styled with a black long sleeved top on the catwalk.

I’m making my own version from…. tshirts, of course!

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CARRIE’S BACK!

Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen, because I enjoyed April’s ‘Carrie Bradshaw Month’ feature so much, I’ve decided to do a sequel. Only this time, it’s going to be bigger and better. The pictures are going to be shot ON LOCATION IN NEW YORK CITY!

That’s right, Charity Shop Chic is going global! :) I will be posting this series throughout this month, so stay tuned for more coming up shortly.

For my first trick I will be attempting to recreate a white jersey dress in the manner of this Halston Heritage number that she wears right at the start of the sequel. Of course, I am using my favourite source of recycled cotton jersey… old tshirts!

I picked up these two white men’s tshirts at the Cancer Research shop in Whitby for £3.50 apiece. One’s marked large, the other small, but crucially they are both completely plain.

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