Fashion Follows Art In 'Sex and the City'

"Sex and the City: The Movie," which opens May 30, is set to be a fashion lover's dream, with reportedly more than 80 costume changes for Carrie and 300 changes for the four leading ladies combined. But a narrative can't survive on clothes alone.

During the course of six seasons on HBO, the women wore increasingly sophisticated clothes because they had increasingly important places to go. Their status in New York evolved — and in many cases, that status was indicated by their connection to various aspects of the culture industry. From the start of the series to the finale, art and fashion progressed on parallel trajectories. And the arc has a continuation in the movie, when the characters enter the big time, each in her own way: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) may tie the knot in a couture gown, but Samantha (Kim Cattrall) bids at a Christie's auction.

In the years since the series began in 1998, auctions (especially Contemporary art auctions) have exploded in terms of attention generated and status conferred. Any movie depicting the good life in New York City circa 2008 would necessarily include some intersection with this high-stakes market. Scenes for the film were shot within the auction house's Rockefeller Center salesroom, according to a spokeswoman at Christie's. And in some ways, the object of the bidding is immaterial: The fact that Samantha is in a position to bid at Christie's suggests she's made it.

What's more, she and Carrie have the auction-appropriate attire. In a still from the film, Carrie wears what looks like an Oscar de la Renta floral dress — one that is a good six seasons more mature than the bare midriffs, tube tops, and lavish nonsense that initially made the show so much fun to watch.

While buying at auction represents a sort of cultural pinnacle, all the seasons of "Sex and the City" are dotted with interactions with the art and literary world at various status levels. Of the four women, it's Carrie whose style (and lifestyle) makes the biggest leap.

In the early seasons, Carrie was a struggling writer with a sex column — one that wasn't important enough (even several seasons later) to get her into a movie screening in Los Angeles. Ms. Parker's long and frizzy hair looked as over-permed as it did in "Flight of the Navigator." Her style was quirky, outrageous, and, though expensive, not exactly presentable. By the time she lands a piece in Vogue (in season four), she is glamorously suited and well-groomed. In the next season, she graduates to a book deal — complete with a book party — and her hair improves accordingly. The curls are smooth and tamed; the cut is bouncy, short, and modern.

Carrie's taste in men tends toward the creative types — except in the case of Big, who is the only professional man in her life and who is described in the first episode as "the next Donald Trump." In season two, she dates a short-story writer. In season three, she begins a long relationship with Aidan, a furniture designer. By season four she has moved on to a jazz musician named Ray, and later she meets Jack Berger, a fellow writer. But the series culminates in her romance with a successful visual artist, Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a creator of light sculptures.

Carrie's style and wardrobe reach their highest level of polish during her relationship with Petrovsky, and, thus, with art. Her romance begins when she and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) spot Petrovsky at an art gallery — where a performance artist is starving herself and calling it art. On her dates with Petrovsky, she listens to him recite Russian poetry and goes to "La Traviata" at the Metropolitan Opera. To be sure that she has something to wear, Petrovsky gives her a hot pink Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress. And at this point in the series, such a dress is only fitting for someone who wears a strapless tea-length gown for dinner with the girls and a fur coat to babysit her friend's 2-year-old.

When Carrie joins Petrovsky in Paris, they live at the Plaza Athénée and she trots down Avenue Montaigne to shop at Dior. The message is clear: She's living at the top of the luxury heap. Likewise, her Russian boyfriend's position in the art world — a living artist, working in a nontraditional medium, with an exhibition in a Paris museum, not simply a gallery — is stratospheric. The exhibition space depicted in the episode was the Jeu de Paume, which is located at the end of the Tuilleries Garden near the Place de la Concorde and is currently used for photography exhibitions. For an equivalent, one has to rely on the imaginary: It's as if Dan Flavin had been given a show during his lifetime at Washington, D.C's Renwick Gallery, located opposite the White House.

For reference, tomorrow's sale of postwar and Contemporary art at Christie's contains two works by Flavin (1933-66), both estimated to fetch between $250,000 and $350,000. But that ignores the art-historical context: Flavin's breakthrough show was in 1964, and according to a recent article in New York magazine, none of the works, each of which was priced at $1,000, were purchased. A suite at the Paris Plaza Athénée today starts at about $2,000 a night.

Carrie is not the only one whose interaction with the arts changes. Samantha has her most meaningful relationship with a waiter-model who starts with an off-Broadway role and later lands a part in a Gus Van Sant film. Charlotte works in an art gallery, but later graduates to a life of decorating her apartment, followed by a stint as a volunteer at the Museum of Modern Art. (And just for fun: In the first episode, Charlotte is lured into the apartment of a publishing hotshot by the chance to see his 1989 Ross Bleckner painting, which she then estimates could be sold for $100,000. The sale at Christie's has one, from 1988, estimated at between $50,000 and $70,000.)

Curiously, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is almost completely isolated from the world of the arts. That explains why her clothes shift only from lawyerly to motherly — and which also explains how she's the first to buy her own apartment.