AND JUST LIKE THAT: This One's Mostly About That Margiela Skirt 🥴

Plus some other stuff that happened in 'Mountainhead for Girls and Gays.'

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Ok, here’s the thing: I kinda only really want to talk about two things this week and they are 1) That necklace Lizzxxette gave Carrie and, relatedly, 2) this ensemble:

But first, here is some other stuff that happened in Mountainhead for Girls and Gays:

Carrie goes to a bar to drink and bitch with Lizlet, that 20-whatever jewelry designer she sold her former apartment to for no money. (I’m actually v curioso re: how wee Lizzy redecorated that place! I wonder if we will ever find out…) The thing Lizzette is bitching about is dating men and how she’s always on her phone due to texting and dating apps. And Carrie’s eyes are, like, glazing over and she’s about to be like “Yeah yeah yeah, dating is lame, we did a whole six seasons of a show about this already.” But just then Lizette is like, “Here is some jewelry for you!” And now she’s got Carrie’s attention!

The jewelry is this weird clunky chainmail-and-keyring looking thing that is supposed to symbolize Carrie’s old beloved apartment or something. And, like, I dunno…I kinda love it and want one too? (This is the a problem with this show: It’s always making me want to buy stuff!) Anyway, this kind of fetishizing of her own life and mythology is right up Carrie’s aesthetic alley so she obviously digs the necklace so much, and Lisette is rewarded by the universe for her thoughtful gifting with a handsome man who buys her a drink.

The next day, Carrie is in her beautiful new secret garden writing her “novel,” which lololololololol is obviously all about herself. Except TWIST! It all takes place in the 1800s or something and will one day be adapted by Baron Julianne Fellowes into HBO-not-Max’s The Guilted Ague starring Miranda Hobbes. Suddenly, though, millions of rats come scurrying out of the foliage and are all like “FUCK YIIIIOOUUUUUU ERIC ADAMS, THIS IS OUR FUCKING CITY SQUEEEEEEEEAAAK! SQUEEEEEAAAAAK, MOTHER FUCKERRRRRRRRSSSSSS! GIVE US ALL YOUR PIZZAS!”

Carrie is just about to send a textual SOS to Aidan Shaw about ratpalooza (describing her garden as “our” garden to him, which frankly sounds delusional, but anyway…) when she remembers that she is not supposed to contact him while he’s in Pigeon Forge or wherever for five years. So, instead she just hires some menial laborers to napalm her the shit out of her back yard leaving it looking basically like this:

*Successfully (?) inserts Interview With the Vampire ref into AJLT recap*

But then out of nowhere Aidan Shaw just appears in her house! And he’s like, “Actually, whatever, you can text me! I only made that dumb no-contact rule for dramatic purposes last season finale!” So, after they do some straight sex, which thankfully neither we nor Carrie’s precious kitten have to witness, he leaves again, and Carrie starts immediately constantly texting him about all the furniture she wants to buy on eBay. But Aidan Shaw has no time for that! He has a fragile teenage boy to prevent from becoming a MAGA incel! So, Carrie spends much of the rest of the episode having a classic spin-out about how he only responds to her texts with emojis.

Miranda’s storyline, meanwhile, is all about how she gets obsessed with a Bisexual MILF Island reality show when she’s supposed to be doing human rights lawyer stuff. (Remember in Season 1 how she was like, “I rushed to JFK with all the other lawyers for the Trump travel ban!” That…crossed my mind yesterday. Which, like, obviously was a really fucked up way to respond to the news. My priorities are fucked…) Anyway, the only person who will engage with her on this subject is the guacamole waitress at this restaurant she keeps going to, and so Miranda gets it into her head that this poor girl is flirting with her. So, she’s like, “Hey baby, wanna come to my MILF Island?” But it turns out Guacamole Girl is straight and is a MILF in her own right with a male husbone and kiddos.

But all is perhaps not lost of Miranda sexuallywise, because Dolly Wells is back ostensibly to also do human rights for the BBC (…sure…), but probably really just to do flirtation with ol’ Hobbles. Miranda is like, “Dolly Wells is A CLASSIC LESBIAN!” Which…say more about that please, show. Because Dolly Wells is, like, an Anne Heche tier dabbler at best, right? Which, actually, I…guess is a classic…something. (Fuuuuuucking RIP Anne Heche tho! Christ, that video of her being put in an ambulance fully haunts me to this very day!) REGARDLESS! Miranda is conflicted due to Dolly Wells being sort of a work colleague. TO BE CONTINUOUS!

Over at the Constance Billiards School for Gossip Girls and Boys, Charlotte and Nicole Ari Parker burst into headmaster Tim Bagley’s office screaming “EMERGENCEY! EMERGENCY! HELP!” And Tim Bagley immediately assumes that they are finally having a school shooting.

…

This…show…made…a school shooting…”joke”?

….

I… I just… I’m just not sure I actually can with this.

Like… Ok. Here’s the thing. I’m…horrible. So, I can actually kind of imagine a smarter, darker show getting away with something like this and it…not being funny so much as…grimly…apt? Like…a sardonic reflection of the sick fucking reality we live in in this country? But on this blithe fucking show it’s just a throw-away gag. As Aidan Shaw so eloquently put it, 👎.

👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎👎

Any fucking way, Charlotte and NAP’s “emergency” was actually that some other moms are hiring a famous college whisperer for their kids. So then they have to stalk Hazel Wassername and force her to college coach their teenage children or something. But then Hazel Wassername is like “Lily is not EDGY enough,” and it’s like, have you not heard her searing viral protest anthem “The Power of Privilege”? Hazel Wassername has somehow definitively not, so Charlotte and NAP fire her.

Criminal underuse of Kristen Schaal: 👎👎👎

Slightly less underused: Cheri Oteri, who plays a matchmaker that Seema’s gay boss hires to find her a man (INAPPROPRIATE! But the boss is an elder white gay, so he can get away with being inappropriate as long as he calls you “Mary.” Those are the rules.) See, Seema has dated every (rich) man in New York City Manhattan and none of them will marry her and she just can’t figure out why. But Cheri Oteri knows why, and it is because Seem always wears animal prints and “metallics,” which make her look “hard.” Excuse me, madam! Those are not “metallics”! They are jewel tone silks, and they are not “hard,” they are SENSUOUS! Who the very fuck is this woman?

So, she forces Seema to put on pink florals and go on a date with some smooth-brained golf club in a suit and not talk at all the whole time. Obviously, Seema is like, “Fuck this Lilly Pulitzer noise” and fires Cheri Oteri on the spot — which she can do, because Cheri Oteri came on the date too for no reason.

Back to Carrie: She’s basically still annoyed with Aidan Shaw for 👎-ing some table she wanted to buy, but instead of communicating her (actually…reasonable?) frustration to him she’s like: 🙄. Then this hunkatron gardener she hired to terraform the nuclear wasteland that is now her backyard shows up and he’s like “What do you want to do with your garden?”

Carrie: “I liked everything the way it was and now it’s all different and I don’t know what’s next and I’m sceeeeeerrrrrred!”

Hot Gardener: “We…are not talking about the garden are we?”

Carrie: 🫦😿🐀🥸 👠✨

Hot Gardener: “Seek therapy, madam.”

Ok, but so now do you want to hear a story about this outfit Carrie is wearing all through the last 10-ish minutes of this episode? Sure you do! Basically, photos of SJP filming all these scenes started showing up online last summer, and I was like, “Oooh, I’m very much digging this interesting skirt and simple yet also kinda interesting top, and the whole color and texture combo and the easy-breezy chicery of it all!” So, here’s what I did next: I attempted to kinda recreate it upon my own person!

I mean, not fully, because sadly, I am not the kind of gaybones who can get away with (or afford) an $800 Margiela pleated denim skirt. But like I said, I was v into the whole vibe and color story. So I search search searched for some knee-length, kinda baggy denim shorts, and what I ended up with were these denim cargo shorts in a light wash from, like, ASOS I think. And they weren’t exactly the same wash as the Margiela skirt, which is a little darker and I think lightly sandblasted? But, you know, whatever.

Initially, I thought I would pair them with one of those filmy taupe v-neck t-shirts that Uniqlo has perpetually in stock. But a thing I sort of learned from shopping at American Apparel all through my 20s is that I am also not a person who can really get away with a v-neck. So, I scrapped that plan and…bought a compression tank top in the same color because it kind of had…stitching detail or whatever that vaguely echoed Carrie’s top. (And for no other reasons re: body image, etc!)

And then, because I’m psychotic detail oriented, I looped a length of baby blue ribbon through one of the belt loops to echo what I thought at the time was a random key lanyard Carrie was wearing. Except now, I’m only just realizing that it wasn’t a key lanyard at all. It was Lisette’s neckLis! 🤯

Anyway, here I am cosplaying Carrie Bradshaw on Fire Island last summer. Feel free to call social services and have me taken out of my own custody.