admin If Carrie Bradshaw is wearing a beret, she is about to make the worst decision of her life. It’s as if the French-ness of wearing a jaunty little cap somehow manages to suffuse her brain with outsized romantic fantasies. It is a distress signal, a blinking SOS that is not lost on those of us who have witnessed—with immense pleasure, I might add—the trials and tribulations of her self-narrated relationship failures.
Bradshaw wears a beret twice in Sex and the City. Once to tell Big that she is willing to continue their relationship once he moves to Paris (he breaks up with her and she throws a McDonald’s at the wall), and again when she arrives in Paris to live with Petrovsky (they subsequently call it quits once she realizes this would not, in fact, be the epic European romance she auditioned for). In both instances, the beret is a tragic reminder of the void between what Carrie wishes for from life and what she actually achieves.
In these instances she is “fashion roadkill”, humiliated by her own wardrobe choices. And in the most recent episode of And Just Like That, Bradshaw wears another beret when she makes the rash decision to sell her apartment and purchase a four-bedroom house where she can live in a domestic paradise with Aidan (who refuses to step foot in her existing home) and his children (who avoid her on FaceTime). The dramatic irony is painful—and classic SATC. And as Bradshaw’s beret has warned us before, this revived relationship is perhaps unlikely to culminate in marital bliss.
Shop a selection of Carrie-approved berets, below.
