Fashion news is slowing down, so in lieu of the usual “Loose Threads,” here are some stories you may have missed in Back Row:
and I shared our thoughts on this week’s couture shows, a few designer debuts, Anna Wintour stepping back as Vogue’s editor-in-chief, and those crazy rumors about Bezos buying the magazine in a Substack Live. You can listen to the audio for free as a podcast if you prefer. (My review of Jonathan Anderson’s men’s debut for Dior is here.)
Speaking of wild Anna rumors, I attempted to cut through the noise in a story answering eight questions about her role change.
Today’s And Just Like That recap discusses Harry’s personal shopper from Bergdorf Goodman. Here’s an exclusive story on what it’s really like to work in that job.
I’ll talk more about the record-setting auction of the original Birkin next week, but if you want to join the discussion now, I started a chat thread that’s open to all readers.
Today’s issue is free, but if you haven’t yet, you can go paid to read all of these stories and more.
And now, recap time!
I had forgotten that Lisa Todd Wexley talked about her dead father in season one of And Just Like That. After her dad died in last week’s episode, what looked like the embarrassing continuity error of her father dying TWICE went viral. At first, some viewers I chat with regularly wondered if she actually had gay dads. It’s a fair theory, but I have a hard time imagining this show would give a character gay parents without beating us over the head with that choice at every turn. Then, a “source close to the series” started back-channeling with outlets like IndieWire and Entertainment Weekly, who rushed to inform their readers that the first death was LTW’s step-dad. Nothing to see here!
Is anyone buying that? I think fans would have respected a named source from the show coming clean and saying they messed up — different people come in and out of the writers’ room, and they made a mistake, etc. Sarah Jessica Parker has already admitted she’s never seen the show, so really, what’s the harm in admitting that others haven’t? Or, they can just own that this show is operating in a plane of reality as warped as its home network, HBO / Max / HBO Max. If HBO can die and came back to life, why can’t Lisa’s dad, you know?
Emma Rosenblum, author of the forthcoming novel Mean Moms, about a group of wealthy forty-something women whose kids attend the same elite private school in Manhattan, pointed out to me that the show has other continuity issues. Like Charlotte’s daughter Lily, who was adopted as an infant in the Sex and the City series finale that aired in February 2004, but is, Rosenblum said, “the eternal high school junior” instead of off at college.
Rosenblum’s book (an advance copy of which I’ve been highly enjoying) chronicles slightly younger characters, but documents a similarly wealthy milieu to the one And Just Like That seems to be trying to capture. The details in her book read as much more true to me than those in this show, so I was curious to get her take on the strange world of And Just Like That. “The fashion is so off. It's so peacock,” said Rosenblum, who pointed out that quiet luxury is still in vogue with wealthy Upper East Side Moms. “No logos, though everything is obviously the finest cashmere, like Loro Piana.” The women always had some out-there fashion moments in Sex and the City, but not like this: “If you look back at the early seasons and you see what they're wearing, there is a semblance of how people actually used to dress.”
The wealth the writers have given these characters has likely contributed to the rut of boredom they can’t seem to climb out of. Money “takes a lot of conflict out of life,” noted Rosenblum. The idea that Seema’s walking-around cash would evaporate once she leaves her firm, if she were one of the most successful realtors in the city, also makes no sense. (Rosenblum: “Realtors work on commission!”)
Also, the show simply fails to capture New York City the way it used to. Rosenblum has seen the And Just Like That crew filming in the Upper East Side. These sets have “become a circus,” she said, and wondered if it was simply logistically more challenging to shoot around Manhattan these days. Whatever the reason may be, the show has abdicated its position as America’s cupcake kingmaker. It hasn’t anointed the next Magnolia Bakery, to say nothing of the next Pastis or the next Manolo Blahnik. “The Instagram food scene in New York is bigger than ever,” said Rosenblum, who would expect to see them at Carbone or Chez Fifi.
Finally, Rosenblum — who doesn’t think the show will kill off Harry — wondered about Carrie and the Tums. “Is she going to be ill? Is that the only direction that they can figure out how to go with these people? Like, ‘Oh, let's give them cancer.’” I thought it was just product placement, but now I, a woman, am wondering.
Ahead, the character-by-character recap of episode seven.
Carrie (and Duncan)
We open with Carrie knocking on Duncan’s door to tell him his first chapter about Margaret Thatcher is “thrilling” and, “I hate you.” She overlooks his nasty pipe-smoking habit. Next thing we know, she and the gals are back at the bulge bakery — their main place of recreation given that, bizarrely, no one in this version of New York exercises or owns a tight brown Alo Yoga set for power walks. Carrie befriends Giuseppe’s mom Gia, who hates Anthony seemingly for his appearance.
Carrie and Miranda leave the bakery together, and Miranda asks what’s going on with Charlotte. Unable to divulge that Harry has prostate cancer, Carrie lies and says Charlotte’s dog Richard Burton has terminal cancer. They decide to throw Charlotte a lavish birthday party in Carrie’s furniture-free house to cheer her up.
Whilst playing with her clothes at home, Carrie receives a call from Anthony, who’s on a bread-resembling landline a tween girl might have had in her room in the nineties. He wants to complain about Gia, and Carrie says she’s going to lunch with her. Cut to the lunch at the fanciest imagineable type of restaurant. Carrie listens to Gia momsplain to her how to manage step-kids. Her cartoon meal consists of a few leaves of bone-dry lettuce where there should have been some type of pretentious carpaccio blanketed in foam, garnished with tweezer-placed caviar.
Carrie gets Duncan to attend Charlotte’s ridiculous birthday party, and he tells her he’s read her first chapter. He raves over the opening sentence to her book, “The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.” You know this man is really horny because he falls all over himself telling Carrie how brilliant that sentence was (“just stopped me dead in my tracks”).
Duncan shows up to the party wearing a nice-looking dark green shirt and khakis that read more as stylish than “man going to office.” I like her curls, but I loved Carrie’s straight har in her party look, which (good job, showrunners) included a faint bustle in the back. With the sparkle stickers on her chest, it was most certainly a triumph of tacky.
The party scene included a charming moment where Carrie is relatably mortified by the scene of Charlotte opening her gifts. Duncan shoos her outside to tell her again how much he liked her pages, and how even as a period novel it was “anchored in this completely grounded and beautifully detailed tableau” and that “the woman — she’s vibrant and she’s completely alive.” Compliments so non-specific that, if I were Carrie, I’d wonder if he read anything but the first sentence. But the writers are at least drawing a contrast between Duncan, a literate man, and Aidan, who probably reads little more than Garfield comics.
After the party wraps up, Miranda is eating a piece of pink cake in the kitchen while she tells Carrie how easy she finds her relationship with Joy. Carrie bristles since Miranda is trying to tell her that Aidan isn’t worth it — which he’s not. This was another moment that felt, finally, real. It’s hard to imagine friends being so close that Harry gathers them together to tell them about his cancer, yet they don’t tell their ringleader that her boyfriend is not treating her well.
Miranda also reveals that she read some of Carrie’s first chapter, and asks Carrie if the woman is based on her. “What are you REALLY saying?” Carrie asks. “The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into,” Miranda says. This was a cutting and great answer and, hot damn, the same question we all ask ourselves when we sit down for this show, week after week.
Miranda
Though it felt true to Miranda’s character that she would tell Carrie that Aidan is about as useful as a clogged toilet, so much about the rest of this Miranda felt insane. Would she be that distraught over Charlotte’s dog having cancer? Would she show up to Carrie’s house wearing a one-shoulder silver jumpsuit with platform heels and a karaoke machine, saying, “Did someone order fun?” Only to add, “Nothing says all-out like balloons and karaoke!”? Also, I appreciate that her son Brady is a good guy who takes out the trash for Carrie, who insists on wearing high heels her every waking second, but didn’t he used to have a personality?
Charlotte
Naturally, as Charlotte continues to fall apart over not being able to talk about Harry’s cancer with her friends, he decides the way to make her feel better is to go to Bergdorf to buy her an expensive handbag. Why communicate with another person when you can just spend money on them?
Related:
Charlotte swings by Bergdorf to get Lily something to make her feel better after her boyfriend breaks up with her, and spots Harry. Harry tries to hide from her because he doesn’t want her to know about Bonnie, his Schiaparelli-accessorized personal shopper. Apparently Bonnie picked out the blouse Charlotte wears. Why Harry would be hiding Bonnie makes no sense — would Charlotte be offended that he went to the trouble of finding someone with taste to tell him how to allocate his money on her designer wardrobe? It seems more likely that they would both use the same personal shopper since someone like Charlotte, who makes elaborate charcuterie boards on weeknights and has something resembling a job now, most certainly wouldn’t be physically going to Bergdorf on a random afternoon, but rather ordering and having things delivered.
At her birthday party, there’s a great moment where her younger gallery colleagues realize they should have brought gifts, though only one of them did. When two of them ask to put their names on the present, the one who brought it says she can’t put three names on a re-gifted $40 candle.
Seema
Seema may be facing financial ruin, but she still has enough money to get her eyelashes done. After that leads to an infection, she shows up to the birthday party from everyone’s nightmares wearing a Louis Vuitton eyepatch. Carrie’s gardener, who’s been eye-fucking Seema for several episodes now, is at the party, wearing the same “in it to win it” T-shirt he had on during the day (to do yard work?). Seema is so seduced by his karaoke performance of “Bette Davis Eyes” that she ends up making out with him in a taxi at the end of the episode.
LTW
Having suffered the indignity of losing her dad for the second time, the writers basically hid LTW away this episode. She emerges at the party wearing sleeves that are attached to her dress, making big circles when she puts her arms out. They should have cut Brady’s lines and had the gals bring their dogs to the party to jump through LTW’s dress holes. Then the woman really would have wondered what she’d gotten herself into.
