This essay comes with a companion piece by me, “A Bestiary in Silks: Fashion and Race in And Just Like That.” This is part of a four-part collaboration with Sarah Miller, with whom I’ve been watching And Just Like That. Sarah has also written a couple of essays: the first is about our viewing experience, “And Just Like That: It Takes A Village,” and the second is a tremendous piece of fan fiction, “Big Problem.” To truly enjoy our quartet, you should read all of them (I recommend sandwiching my two essays in between Sarah’s works, for maximum effect).
Also, support us, please. Sarah’s support link is here, and mine is here. Writing is all we do, and if you’d like to see more of such work, we need financial support.
Spoilers abound but, trust me, that won’t matter: this show is awful and makes very little sense.
Fashion, not style, was at the heart of Sex and the City and And Just Like That is similarly obsessed with designer cachet. Style is an expression and might involve choices that defy fashion codes or appropriateness: one of the most stylish women I’ve ever seen was a student who stepped onto the DePaul station on the el one day, wearing a random t-shirt, an unremarkable skirt…and shiny, sequined pink shoes. It was exam week, and you could tell from her face that she was powering through the last days of the term on some combination of caffeine and adrenaline. She was clearly rushing back home from the library or an exam, and her sartorial choices that day were probably dictated by little more than the need to be clothed for society. And then, perhaps at the last minute or perhaps as a deliberate choice or, really, both, she slipped on those shoes. As she stood in front of me at the door, I saw her glancing down at them every now and then and I could swear at a hint of a smile every time. They made little sense, but they delighted her—and me. They created a look and an attitude, a deliberate confidence, that none of the women of And Just Like That, trundling around with every conceivable designer name on them, possess. They said, “Life sucks right now, but I have my pink, sparkly shoes.”
Similarly: if you want to see the embodiment of perfect style, look to the four teens in the FX show Reservation Dogs, each of whom bears an utterly effortless “look,” if we must call it that. Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), for instance, wears beautiful, long beaded earrings with her shirts and cargo pants, often topped by a backwards baseball hat. At one point, the four are preparing for a fight with rivals and there’s a split second—captured in this shot—when Willie pauses to take off her jewellery before swinging into the fray, with the slightest smile on her face. It’s a smile that says, “Okay, I’m about to kick ass, but let me just put these away for a bit.” It’s a sensible choice, born out of wisdom and experience: long earrings can be painful when yanked out during a tussle, or they can just get in the way. This is why the flowing mane on Carol (Melissa McBride) in the later episodes of The Walking Dead never made any sense—do you really want to give a horde of zombies so much to grab in a fight?
To be fair to Sex and the City: it never began as a showcase for designers but became one as the show suddenly and unexpectedly became a huge success—and acquired a much bigger budget. You can see a similar shift in the brilliant and highly underrated Elementary, starring Lucy Liu as a modern-day (Joan) Watson to Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes. As the show became more successful over its seven seasons, Liu’s clothing in particular became even more elegant as the years went on but she was never just a doll-like figure showcasing designers. Instead, like many actually well-dressed people, her outfits were a combination of the unique and the everyday: a pink skirt by Roland Mouret was paired with a Uniqlo shirt, for instance. In contrast, every woman on AJLT looks like she has been “put together” by a stylist, and badly. For reasons hard to understand, Miranda’s hair (orange or blonde) matches all her outfits. Charlotte is obsessed with Burberry—this seems to be a new trait because I don’t recall such fanatic devotion in previous iterations, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention (it happens, often, with me and this show). Most of the time, she looks like a promotional Barbie doll dressed from head to toe in the signature checked pattern. In episode five of this season, we see that Carrie might find a new romance, in the shape of George Campell (Peter Hermann). When she goes over to his place, she can’t help but notice that it’s stuffed and decorated with the works of nearly every well-known artist —here a Koons, there a Calder—and she asks if it’s an actual museum. He, it turns out, is immensely rich—one of those app developers—and he seems to be the kind of guy who went to a consultant and said, “Here’s my money, help me buy every kind of art that’s worth owning.” Carrie slyly points this out, marking him as nouveau something, but she may want to look closer because this is how she and her cohort dress: just as George only wants to acquire and own art, there’s no real love for clothes and style among these women, only a slavish devotion to brands and trends.
Style is when you wear clothes and make them work for you. Fashion is when the clothes wear you.
See also a companion piece to this one, “A Bestiary in Silks: On Fashion in And Just Like That.“ Also see Sarah Miller’s “And Just Like That: It Takes A Village,” and her fan fiction, “Big Problem.”
This piece is not behind a paywall, but represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it, using my name and a link, should it be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work in any way. And if you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X, 1884.
The title is derived from “The Style It Takes,” by John Cale and Lou Reed.