Field styled Sex and the City, The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty, ran her own boutique, and claims to have invented leggings. She describes her wild life, and what it’s like to dress Patti Smith, Madonna and Cardi B
It is midday, and in New York the costume designer Patricia Field is gearing up to talk about Sex and the City. A “costume person and a fashion person”, Field, who turns 82 this week, is best known as the woman who put Carrie in a tutu and Samantha in Giorgio di Sant’Angelo bodysuits, convincing us along the way that a newspaper columnist could fit 200 pairs of shoes inside a Manhattan studio apartment. There was nothing in the script, but the party line, according to one of Field’s costume assistants, is that Carrie had a storage container in Brooklyn.
She is also the person who put Aidan Shaw, Carrie’s lapdog-of-a-suitor, in turquoise jewellery and expected us to get behind him. “He [John Corbett] had just done some sapless show and he wanted to repeat the look,” she says of his necklaces, while rolling her eyes. “I was like, OK, this is gonna be tricky.”
