The Shanghai collections opened this week, but a visa problem has grounded this reviewer in New York for the time being. Yet you did not have to be in the hall to experience the atmosphere of Mark Gong’s show, which officially opened the SHFW program on Thursday afternoon. Thanks to the magic of WeChat livestreams and the many friends reporting live, the show’s setting was easily identified as the living room of one Charlotte York-Goldenblatt. (Formerly MacDougal, it should be said, as it was Trey MacDougal’s Park Avenue penthouse that Charlotte kept during the divorce that Gong recreated for this scene.)
This spring collection was the fourth and final part of Gong’s Sex and the City saga, in which the designer focused on Charlotte, wonderfully embodied by actress Kristin Davis. Ask anyone “which SATC character are you?”, and chances are no one will identify themselves as her, as she was the most traditional, prim and prudish on the block – you might even call her demure. “I had a hard time choosing Charlotte as my final character at first,” Gong said via a ballot after his show. “Charlotte was the perfect housewife with a perfect marriage and children, but I always found her cringe.”
Gong’s ‘Gong Girls’ are known for being youthful, playful and outspoken – the antithesis of Charlotte. It was this that forced the designer to continue with her as his muse. “I wanted to make it about the real Charlotte; her desires and her wishes. If I were Charlotte, what would I do and what would I want?
It’s part of growing up to revisit people and characters like Charlotte and understand their motivations and ambitions. Here, Gong repeated some of Charlotte’s biggest sartorial hits, sometimes literally – like the infamous vintage Valentino skirt that her daughter Lily destroyed with red paint – but mostly, to his credit, abstractly. There were cute knit sets and stylish polka dots and ginghams on silk dresses and wool suits. There were beautiful and intricate floral appliqués, lots of sharp tailoring and some fantastic LBDs. It was a decidedly more mature setup for the designer, and it found momentum and singularity where he dressed it up as a true Gong girl would; with graphic t-shirts worn under corsets, hot pants, sneakers and sexy bralettes to match otherwise soccer mom capris. His interpretation of the latter, with its mix of relaxed attitude and sultriness, felt fresh and good. At the tail end of this “very conscious, very understated” online moment, Gong asks the right question: I wondered if Charlotte was the real breakout fashion star of Sex and the City after all?