Sex And The City: The Wedding Dress Controversy

The end of the series created a void in many women's television schedules that was ironically filled with uniform clad characters working in hospitals or police stations. It seemed we had to return to the glossy magazines for fashion ideas. While these fashion bibles have always been a staple of any good girl’s style education, they remain aloof and impersonal in typical bookish manner. Only TV can give us real, moving, breathing, menstruating, weight-fluctuating, job switching women who give us examples of how we can mesh the random collection of items in our wardrobe into our own individual sense of style. And the SATC girls did it so well.

So it's no surprise that the launch of the movie has created such a flux of fashion commentary. Reams of paper and billions of kilobytes have already been filled with comments, both bad and good, about what the girls are wearing, with Carrie's wedding dress causing the most sensation.

Like most of Carrie's outfits, the Vivienne Westwood creation is pure love-it-or-loath-it fashion. While most people express an overwhelming dislike for the gown, I find it hard to see why. The silk gown is immaculately tailored and does a fabulous job of making Sarah Jessica Parker´s androgynous frame look feminine. And although it does have over-top proportions of buffon layers and a highly stylized bodice, it is noticeably lacking in any frills, ruffles, sparkles or sequins to push the designer statement over the edge.

At the end of the day (or the movie), would you really expect to see Carrie in anything that resembled an off-the-rack, run of the mill gown? This is a lady who wore a pink tutu in public.