9 Carrie Bradshaw Outfits That Would Still Be Totally On-Trend In 2025

"Following fashion trends? It's a waste," declared Patricia Field — the costume visionary behind "The Devil Wears Prada," "Ugly Betty," and, perhaps most iconically, "Sex and the City." Nowhere did that ethos manifest more vividly than in the character of Carrie Bradshaw, played with unflinching charm by Sarah Jessica Parker. In her memoir, "Pat in the City," Field calls Parker "the person I've enjoyed dressing the most," a sentiment that becomes obvious the moment Carrie steps into frame.

Carrie wrote one column a week and spent her rent on Manolos. Her closet made little economic sense, even in 1998, when "Sex and the City" first aired, and even less now. Today, in an age of gig economy precarity and secondhand minimalism, her consumer habits and financial choices may read differently. But style, unlike rent, doesn't traffic in logic. Debt aside, she always dressed like the rent was due.

To assign her a core style aesthetic is like trying to distill New York City into a single skyline photo. Her wardrobe was inconsistent, erratic, sometimes self-sabotaging — but never uninteresting. In today's world of algorithmic taste and wardrobe genre-fication, her refusal to be pinned down and veer into her own fashion narrative entirely feels inspiringly rebellious. As her best outfits resurface in the fashion moodboards of 2025, I couldn't help but wonder: Is Carrie's greatest gift to fashion not just showing us how to dress, but proving that real style, much like love, should only get better with time?  

The year was 1999. Flip phones were chic, email had yet to ruin everyone's day, and cable TV belonged to four women in Manhattan gossiping openly about sex. Season 2, Episode 15: Carrie's dating a novelist whose family she adores; Miranda's seeing a single dad; Charlotte is force-feeding muffins to her heartbroken brother, only for Samantha to serve him a different kind of comfort entirely.

But it's Carrie's gray bodycon dress that steals the episode — and, quite frankly, the decade. The gray bodycon by James Perse was pure minimalist seduction. Today, it could easily be mistaken for something from SKIMS, and it's been endlessly echoed by off-duty models like Kendall Jenner and Emrata ever since.

To style it now, keep the palette cool and the lines clean: delicate silver jewelry, thin '90s frames, a crescent-shaped shoulder bag, and either sleek retro sneakers or barely-there heels (anything more risks slipping into the outdated shoe trends you don't want to be caught wearing during 2025). Finish with a glossed lip and something overpriced and caffeinated.

In Season 4, Episode 2, Carrie is reluctantly talked into walking in a charity runway show. It's only when she learns that Dolce & Gabbana personally selected her for their look that she agrees. She's zipped into a slinky black D&G gown scattered with oversized painterly florals.

On the day of the show, the stylist swaps her into something more skin-baring. She makes it halfway down the runway before breaking a heel and falling. But the outfit change and the theatrical spill together did nothing to diminish the staying power of the original Dolce & Gabbana gown.

Two decades later, Nicole Kidman wore a near-identical vintage gown to the 2024 Gotham Awards. In a red carpet era shaped by archival sourcing and the return of model florals among the hottest dress trends of summer 2025, it turns out the dress she didn't wear was the one with real longevity.

For anyone who came of age during the era of media heroines — "Sex and the City," "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," "13 Going on 30," "Confessions of a Shopaholic," "Bridget Jones' Diary," "Ugly Betty, "The Devil Wears Prada" — this dress will always be front-page material.

After cornering Natasha to set the record straight about her affair with Big, Carrie moves through Manhattan in slow motion, wrapped in John Galliano's newspaper-print slip for Dior. If she was going to mine her heartbreak for journalistic fodder, she might as well wear it.

The dress now belongs to fashion folklore — fetching eye-watering sums at auction (around the $245,000 mark) and spawning fast fashion imitations in its wake. As Data But Make It Fashion quipped on Instagram: "given that this dress (likely) retailed for a couple thousand dollars back in 2001-2002, this has got to be one of the best investments of the past 20yrs," before adding, "the stock market could neverrrr."

We'll be the first to admit it: we love an unforgettable celebrity revenge dress moment. And Carrie's Dior version — worn to confront Big outside The Plaza, just as he's leaving his and Natasha's engagement brunch — is a fine, if not defiant, example of the genre.

"I just need to ask one thing," she says, stopping him on the sidewalk. "Why wasn't it me?" Big's answer is vague at best (he's never been one for complete sentences). But the dress says more than he ever could. That she wears white — unmistakably bridal in palette — feels like a deliberate, pointed inversion of the trope.

Beautifully simple, the look transcends trend and time. It would feel just as sharp today as it did then. This — and the way it flatters her effortlessly — secures its place as one of Carrie's best looks.

Before TikTok named it, before Miu Miu reimagined it, Carrie Bradshaw was already wearing it: the now-iconic tulle skirt that opens "Sex and the City," still fluttering through the fashion imagination decades later. Patricia Field famously plucked the skirt from a $5 bin in a showroom — a forgotten scrap of whimsy — but instantly saw its potential. Sarah Jessica Parker had a ballerina's past, and Carrie, in Field's words, had "princess syndrome."

The look almost didn't make it, she told the Guardian. Darren Star, the show's creator, didn't understand it. "If we put something that is trendy on the opening moments, and if this show is a hit, this trendy thing is going to get stale," Field warned. And she was right — the show became a hit, and the skirt became a signature. It was later reimagined for the series finale and again for the first filmed, framing Carrie's evolution without ever abandoning her essence.

In the 2020s, its relevance is renewed. The Nutcracker aesthetic came to bring us balletcore, supported by the ballet flats revival, and just like that, softness was a statement again.

Cannes may have cracked down on sheer gowns this year (a ban that still couldn't rescue the worst-dressed list at the 2025 film festival), but Carrie Bradshaw's Season 1 wedding guest look remains a compelling argument in their favor.

The dress, a blush-toned, strapless slip from Donna Karan's Spring 1999 collection, is little more than a breath of fabric. Body-skimming and diaphanous, if she wore it to our wedding, we'd probably be furious. But we love it because it's stylish and fearless (and because Carrie can wear next-to-nothing and still somehow make it feel like a fully formed thought).

The dress resurfaced in 2025 with a royal seal of approval. Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece wore it, captioning her Instagram post with a wink to its most iconic wearer, "I couldn't help but wonder ..." It was a fitting homage to Carrie Bradshaw — and to the "princess syndrome" Patricia Field diagnosed so perfectly.

Not every great Carrie Bradshaw look involved spectacle. Some, like a fitted white tank and a blush pink sequin skirt, were domestic, but no less enduring. Spotted in her apartment mid-phone call, she sports an outfit defined by Y2K off-duty glam.

It's that particular elevated nonchalance that Carrie Bradshaw does so well — the effortlessness of her cool, Manhattan fabulousness. The tank top provides the requisite downtown insouciance, as the sequinned skirt lets her theatricality flourish.

Time has vindicated this fantastic combination. Keen observers of street style will attest that statement skirts and dresses have become the go-to trend of today's fashion mavens — a development that would surely delight Carrie. And then there's the question of shoes (for there is always the question of shoes). Our leading lady likely lifted this entire enterprise with a pair of Manolos. But finding the most stylish shoes to wear with your midi skirt needn't require a Manhattan salary.

This particular paragon of Bradshaw bravado featured a luxurious fur coat draped over a delicate ruffled blouse, paired with a plaid mini skirt and those unmistakable snakeskin stiletto boots. In this look, she radiated an unapologetic confidence. No wonder John Slattery's character found himself so utterly enamoured (and willing to wait for her on the steps of her brownstone).

Assuming we're dealing with faux fur (as any conscientious iteration would demand), this look would still hold up today. The mob wife aesthetic TikTok trend may have seemed like just another fleeting social media microtrend. But as we've seen in 2025, celebs have proven the mob wife aesthetic is sticking around. Even the proportions here feel contemporary: the way the voluminous coat balances the abbreviated skirt. As a complete look, it's a stroke of styling genius.

In May 2025, Data But Make It Fashion calculated what can only be described as a seismic shift in our understanding of pattern hierarchy: polka dots had officially surpassed florals as the spring pattern of choice. Miranda Priestley's "Groundbreaking" would, for once, be delivered without sarcasm.

We can consider, then, this particular Carrie ensemble with fresh eyes. All set for a trip to the Caribbean with Big, she donned a fitted Bardot-style white top with a navy polka-dotted midi skirt. Tucking the top into the high-waisted skirt, Carrie's instinct for proportion once again serves her well here

Polka dots can be a double-edged sword in fashion. Wear them wrong, and you're too easily evoking vintage fancy dress. But Carrie Bradshaw cracked this code, teaching us how to lean into the polka dot renaissance without looking too twee. She may have struggled to connect the dots about Mr. Big, but at least she had no trouble making them work in her wardrobe.