Carrie Bradshaw Month 2: Your girl is lovely, Hubbell

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!

It’s cut on the bias, but it’s not silk. It’s a sort of crepey cotton, so it has texture, unlike Carrie’s Dior version. I bought it for £3.30 at the British Heart Foundation shop in Whitby.

Confession time… this dress is a total hack. Here’s what I did. This is not intended to be a tutorial of any kind, so follow it at your peril.

First, I unpicked the waistband to see if there was any extra length to be gained. Happily, the waistband was just the top of the skirt folded over, so I managed to gain 5 cm!

Here’s the awful ‘hacky’ part. I opened the side seams from the top about 15 cm to make room for armscyes and put the whole thing on, pinned to my clothes. Then I pinned on some scrap material at the right length of the straps. Followed by pinning a rough shape of the armscyes and neckline, front and back.

I know… a total hack. The red lines below represent the pinned style lines that I cut.

Here’s the shape of the armscyes.

I also shaped the sides of the dress like so:

Then I used the off cuts to make the top of the straps (as per the yellow material ‘pattern’).

Here’s how it looks… not too shabby, considering.

The edge finish is simply overlocked, folded under and stitched close to the edge.

Here’s the final garment.

When I put this on ready to take the pictures, it was really, really low cut… that was the intended effect, but I chickened out a little which is why you can see my slip in these pictures.

The Plaza is open again after quite a while refurbishing and it was great to see inside it, too (though we wanted to have a drink in the bar and that was closed). Countless movies have been filmed here and it was great to finally see inside! Unfortunately there was scaffold on the outside, but you can’t have everything you wish for, I suppose. To my delight there was a fleet of limos outside waiting to pick up guests – so it was really easy to imagine one of them contained Big and Natasha. I hadn’t imagined that they would always be there!

I also had fun imagining myself in the original ‘The Way We Were’!

26 comments

  1. Kim

    For a hack, the dress is brilliant. To be honest, I think that this copy looks better on you than the original did on SJP. Very flattering. Congratulations.

    Reply
  3. Donna Balboa Ellis

    i read your posts religiously, although i haven’t commented before! i just wanted to let you know that i think you are amazing, talented, creative …etc! i love the interpretations of movie clothes that you do. you sew beautifully as well! all the best, donna

    Reply
  4. Joyce

    That dress looks pretty wonderful for something that was supposed to be ‘just a hack’! Really enjoying your re-interpretations of Carrie Bradshaw’s outfits too

    Reply
  8. Helga

    I have literally just found you, and you are amazing!!!
    What you do is one of my favourite things to do,only I’ve never documented it…due to being too lazy or forgetting until it’s done!
    Rock the hell on, you are inspirational and doing a huge service!

    Reply
  11. Cecilee

    Just started following your blog sometime last week. This is my favorite one of yours so far. You wouldn’t even know that this was made from an old skirt! Beautiful! :)

    Reply

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