I'm not sure that Georgia O'Keeffe would have loved Sex & The City but I'm pretty sure Sex & The City loves Georgia O'Keeffe. Those lady flowers are everywhere.
While it's true that you can't really make a wedding movie without a floral arrangement, Sex... doesn't just use flowers for the bouquet toss.
Just give me the damn symbolic vaginas
-The Bachelor (1999)
Flowers cling to Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw like she's a one woman photosynthesis factory. It'd be a stretch to say that every costume includes them but more often than not costume designer Patricia Field has dipped Carrie in vats of them: green florals (buying an apartment), red (bragging about her boyfriend), purple (single again), huge gigantor white florals just because. She's a photosynthesis factory and a color wheel.Subtlety has never been Sex and the City's strong suit. The movie is all about the act of handing her ladyparts over to Big permanently, so they must be fully visualized. She even beats Big over the head with them!
Carrie has never been a shrinking violet, she's always an exhibitonist. She parades it around. She turns heads with it on the street. She even writes best selling books about it as you know.
The other women are not without their own floral motifs. Charlotte (Kristin Davis), always the most subdued, doesn't wear a lot of flowers but she's named her daughter "Lily" so she's done her part. Her sexuality was always goal oriented anyway.
The older women get floral representation too, albeit with less saturation. Carrie's envious editor (Candice Bergen) has given up. She's framed hers and hung it in her office.
Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who kept Sex in Sex and the City (the TV show) even when it forgot its libido late in the run, isn't having a lot of sex (in the movie). She wears no florals but in one key sequence she decides that she must have a pricey bit of jewelry at auction.
This flower ring is the essence of me. One of a kind.It's a symbolic vagina for a symbolic vagina (oh, the folds and layers!). See, her boyfriend Smith Jerrod also wants to purchase the ring and Samantha's entire subplot becomes a tug of war between them. Smith wants her ladyparts for himself. She wants them back.
This leaves two characters and they're both conspicuously lacking in the flower power. 'Saint Louise from St Louis' (Jennifer Hudson) has no vagina. Poor thing. She's only there to help Carrie, so I guess they figure she doesn't need one?
And finally there's Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) who definitely has one but is being punished for pretending she doesn't. Her vagina is furious and only comes out once (barely visible: black on dark brown) to warn Big away from Carrie's vagina.
My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed off. My vagina's furious and it needs to talk.Miranda is all work work work and 'let's get this over with' mood killer. Unless she learns to let Steve in, she'll never be able to wear bright floral prints again!
-The Vagina Monologues
P.S. We'll find out if Miranda is back in bloom when Sex and the City 2 opens next year on this very weekend.
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