If an occasion to favor leg warmers over Lanvin exists, it’s arrived with “The Carrie Diaries.” Premiering Jan. 14 on the CW, the “Sex and the City” prequel chronicles the life of a 16-year-old Carrie Bradshaw, circa 1984. There will be boys and breakdowns and big hair, and it’ll all be drowning in ’80s fashion gone good.
“We wanted to have a modern feel and not just be over-the-top kitschy,” says Eric Daman, the costumer tasked with “pre-creating” Bradshaw.
Daman, who dressed the “Gossip Girl” cast for six seasons and assisted Patricia Field on “Sex and the City” in its heyday, walked The Post through “The Carrie Diaries” wardrobe closet — a teenage dream ensconced in Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. Herein lies a mélange of tapered jeans, party dresses and kitten heels, culled from vintage boutiques like the East Village’s No Relation and fast fashion shops like H&M, Zara, Topshop and Forever 21. High-end designers are sprinkled in — a pleated Dior skirt here, a pair of stacked-heel Chloé boots there.
“For me, it was important to identify who Carrie could be in a modern day versus who she was in the ’80s and find a balance between that,” says Daman.
The pieces that strike it are stashed in a fitting room, its walls collaged with nostalgia: Angsty Brat Packers, Rob Lowe at the peak of heartthrob-dom and Sarah Jessica Parker as a Square Peg. A rainbow of shoes and bags pops against the carpet, opposite a wall dripping with costume baubles. With blonde curls and a petite frame that screams early Carrie Bradshaw, 19-year-old AnnaSophia Robb was the perfect pick to star in this series. She spends several hours a week here, getting fitted for an average of seven to nine ensembles per episode.
“It’s so much fun to see the fearless choices Carrie makes,” Robb recently gushed to The Post.
Though she wasn’t of age to watch “Sex and the City” during its original run (the actress was 12 when it went off the air), she prepped for her role with a series binge. “I was obsessed,” she says. “I sat in bed one Saturday and just watched episodes back to back to back.”
The show’s timing is actually quite serendipitous given the current popularity of ’80s fashion trends. What Daman hasn’t found in vintage stores, he’s easily scored from Urban Outfitters, Marc by Marc Jacobs and other retailers. And while he’s aiming to make the looks a bit more of-the-moment, shoulder pads and lace gloves won’t be completely absent. “I grew up in the ’80s, and I loved it,” he says. “And I’m loving it again!”
But when it came to Carrie’s two identifying pieces — an everyday necklace and a personalized bag — Daman chose modern designs from New York jeweler Alex Woo and iconic leather goods label Mark Cross, respectively.
“She wears this little ‘C’ necklace,” Daman says of the gold accessory slung around Bradshaw’s neck in the new series. “It’s the Carrie necklace before the Carrie necklace.”
The bag, meanwhile, becomes a signature because of a happy accident in the plot, which revolves around Carrie’s recent loss of her mother.
When her little sister Dorrit goes sneaking around their mother’s closet, she finds the plain black bag and stashes it away, only for a bottle of nail polish to spill all over it. Carrie then reclaims the satchel and makes it her own by adding her name to it.
“[Carrie’s] mother has passed, and she’s a 16-year-old trying to figure things out on her own,” Daman reveals. “A bow blouse that she has to wear to her internship in New York might also have been her mom’s from the ’70s.
“I think it’s important that she’s not all of a sudden walking down the halls of high school in Manolos.”
Still, he promises that over time we’ll see Bradshaw fall for Blahnik. And for those still mourning the departure of “Gossip Girl,” they’ll be a new set of sartorial choices to swoon over. “It’s perfect timing because now there’s that void,” says Seventeen fashion director Gina Kelly. “There’s no amazing teen fashion moment happening on TV, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that ‘The Carrie Diaries’ is going to deliver.”
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