Sex and the City: Sarah Jessica Parker and Patricia Field dish the fashion

Apparently Sex and the City the series saved the best for last, as Sarah Jessica Parker named an outfit from the final episode her favorite: ''I think I loved the tutu dress that I wore at the end of the Paris episode because it was an outfit that was about an image that Carrie had, which was, like so often happens to Carrie, what she wanted to project onto the scenario of wearing that dress, a pie in her face. That outfit got to tell so many stories, and it was such a romantic outfit and it was so delicate and it had so much grace to it, and it ran around Paris, and that was not how she had imagined that outfit.''

SATC costume designer Patricia Field's No. 1 pick for Carrie — a Versace gown — was also worn in Paris. But it saw a little less action: ''Some people make these crocheted doily gowns that they put on dolls and it goes over a toilet-paper roll. They crochet this gown for a doll and the gown is really big, and then you just put the doll over the toilet-paper roll and it sits in their bathroom. I always found that hysterical. That's what that gown meant to me. When we shot [the next-to-last episode], Carrie was waiting for Aleksandr to come to her hotel room in Paris, and in the end he showed up very late. That gown is huge. I set that gown over the bed, and it literally covered the bed. It was the perfect princess moment.''

Carrie isn't known for recycling — fashion at least — which is what made one pair of sandals so special in the first movie: ''Carrie never wears anything twice. But when we did the first movie, there was a pair of [Dior gladiator sandals] that I brought to [Parker] that she just loved. Every time we needed a pair of shoes, she would always grab the same ones. And I would say, "Sarah Jessica, Carrie never wears the same thing twice!? But I couldn't keep her away from them. Those shoes started a trend that is still going on.''

One of the most memorable fashion moments from the first film was when love-it-or-hate-it headpiece Carrie wore for what she thought would be her trip down the aisle: ''It was so beautiful in person, and, I know, really offensive to some, and I apologize. But it was produced long before I was born. Any time that thing molted, I saved every feather. When we finally found a place to work it in, it was such a victory. [Michael Patrick King] was so stunned by it, he didn't even have the presence to say no. He was just like, 'Oookay, you have a bird on your head,' which he then wrote into the [first] movie — Carrie says, 'I put a bird on my head for him!?' [The rental company] wouldn't let me buy it. I was like, 'Please just name the dollar amount.' And they were like, 'No, we want the bird.' I'm still worried about that bird. I don't think anyone's going to take care of that bird the way I took care of it.''

If it seems Carrie often ends up in voluminous skirts, sometimes made of tulle, Field says it's no coincidence that Carrie often ends up in voluminous skirts made of tulle: ''When Carrie is in the Middle East [in the new film], there's a scene where she's wearing a J'Adore Dior T-shirt. I teamed it with a petticoat under a gown, a lavender-and-white, bicolor thing. That, to me, was a nod to the original petticoat and the T-shirt that we all know so well from when she got splashed by the bus, and all of the nods throughout the series to the ballerina effect.''