Every magazine in the country (
including ours
) has something to say about
Sex and the City 2
, despite the movie’s
frigid critical reception
. For
Elle Décor
that means
a spread of interiors
from the movie
—
pegged to Carrie’s quip, early on: “I’ve been cheating on fashion with furniture”
—
as well as a
recycled story from 2006
about Candace Bushnell’s Greenwich Village apartment. If the movie’s interiors (like the movie’s characters) each hit one note a bit tirelessly, the rooms in Bushnell’s apartment (not including the kitchen, which is unexceptional) seem to fit four completely different schools of decorating
—
and even weirder, each room feels like it belongs in the apartment of one of Bushnell’s famous quartet.
Bushnell’s living room , like her literary doppelganger, Carrie Bradshaw, is the star of the show. High pedigree items, such as a Louis XVI sofa that used to live in Jay McInerney’s storage space, mingle with bohemian accents, such as Moroccan poufs and a retro floor lamp. There’s a tall bookshelf filled with books at least half of whose spines are pink. An abstract canvas by East Village art star, Caio Fonseca, in a palette that clashes with the rest of the room, keeps things feeling edgy. The result is a spot-on approximation of Carrie’s high/low, retro/modern, tacky/refined aesthetic — that downtown-girl-in-an-uptown-world eclecticism that made ladies the nation over think it was a good idea to pair tutus with Manolos .
If Carrie’s style finds a funky medium between kitsch and extravagance, Charlotte’s is decidedly high and stuffy. Enter the den , which looks like it belongs in the short-lived conjugal home of Charlotte and her first husband , the WASP-ily stodgy and sexually impotent Dr. Trey MacDougal. Charlotte and Trey preferred interiors that resembled the inside of a Ralph Lauren store . In Bushnell’s den, campaign chairs sit across from a sofa upholstered in deep red velvet. A barely-visible library table is stately, as is a tailored lampshade on the far side of the sofa. A Chinese console in the background feels like a relic of imperial days. The deep yellow walls are a fussy misstep (much like Trey, himself). A few pieces of abstract art gesture towards Charlotte’s former life as a gallerista, but they feel lost in the morass of heavy, cluttered furniture and too many different shades of wood.
I feel comfortable saying that few who watched Sex and the City ever connected much with the awkward and inconsistent fashion sense of corporate attorney, Miranda Hobbes. But that didn’t stop Bushnell from channeling Miranda’s mismatched frumpiness in her own bedroom . An antique suzani bedspread and a lime-green Madeline Weinrib dhurrie might reflect the long print dresses Miranda sometimes dons in the summer time, but together they clash and fight for attention. Mid-century modern lamps with wooden shades could be whimsically campy, but perched on stocky antique bedside chests, they just seem random. The bed, which juts out at a diagonal, looks as ill-at-ease in the room as Miranda does in most of her outfits. The white walls and practical bed frame pick up on Miranda’s no-nonsense manner, but the room on the whole feels, like Miranda’s style, undefined and ill-conceived.
In the parlance of bathrooms, the term vanity usually refers to the piece of furniture that holds up the sink. In Bushnell’s powder room the term takes on added significance. Bushnell chose to wallpaper her bathroom, from the wainscoting up, with a pop art-style glamour shot of her own face, lest her guests forget that she is beautiful while they are doing their business. While it’s hard to relate to the ego that would make this choice, it’s easy to see the literary correlate who might approve of such unabashed narcissism, and of the fuschia and yellow color scheme : brassy, bawdy, and egotistical PR maven, Samantha Jones.
Why would Candace Bushnell decorate her home in the style of her characters (albeit with the help of a decorator, Susan Forristal , who strangely also decorated the homes of Griffin Dunne and Bret Easton Ellis)? Has the phenomenon of Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha become so huge that it has subsumed its creator? (And if so, is that why she looks so possessed and uncomfortable posing for this story?) Is this an example of life imitating art, or of life imitating art imitating life? Perhaps the more important question is: why would Elle Décor , a serious style magazine, run such a disjointed mish-mash of a project?
