Sarah Jessica Parker talks 'thrilling' reveal of Carrie’s wedding dress in 'And Just Like That...'

Spoiler alert! The following story contains major details about the Season 2 premiere of "And Just Like That...," a sequel to "Sex and the City."

Vivienne Westwood famously said to "buy less, choose well, make it last."

That’s precisely what Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) does in the Season 2 premiere of Max’s “And Just Like That…” (now streaming). Preparing to attend the Met Ball, Carrie runs into a code-red fashion emergency the day of the event, when the upstart designer making her dress confesses that it’s still unfinished. After hours of panicked fittings, she heads to her closet to find another option.

After pulling out a box, we cut to Carrie in a revamped version of her old wedding gown, descending the stairs of her Manhattan brownstone before the end credits roll. Parker and executive producer Michael Patrick King tell us how and why they brought the iconic look back.

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Sarah Jessica Parker says it was 'thrilling' to rewear Carrie's wedding gown

Carrie’s bridal gown has a lot of baggage, to put it lightly. She first wore the voluminous Vivienne Westwood dress in the 2008 “Sex and the City” movie, when she got stood up at the altar by Mr. Big (Chris Noth). The pair reconciled and married by film’s end, but their wedded bliss was short-lived: Big died of a heart attack in the first episode of “And Just Like That…” in 2021, sending Carrie into a tailspin of grief.

By choosing to shake the mothballs off the gown in Season 2, Carrie gets to reclaim it as a symbol of empowerment and rebirth.

“That dress, every fiber of it has had ideas projected on it,” Parker explains. “It holds a huge amount of memory and emotion and story, and I thought it was a thrilling idea for Carrie to be forced to confront it and kind of recreate its poetry.”

With six seasons and two films of "Sex and the City" for the writers to pull from, “you can pick and choose what Easter eggs you really want to drop,” King says. “I knew that wedding gown meant something to Carrie, but also to the fans. And I knew it would create some kind of (reaction), like, ‘What’s happening? Why is she in that?’ A picture says 1,000 tweets, so from a show point of view, it was exciting to create that moment.

“It’s her saying, ‘I’ve repurposed my pain,’" he continues. "It's a perfect way of showing that she's moving forward with a new point of view about it all."

'We weren't convinced we could actually get the original dress back'

After shooting the first movie 15 years ago, Parker held onto the bird-shaped headpiece that accompanied Carrie’s wedding veil. Locating the dress, however, was a whole different story.

King called the show’s costume designers, Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago, before trying Parker. But no one had any clue where the gown was. Eventually, the show’s wardrobe team tracked it to the Vivienne Westwood archives in England.

“I was getting bulletins, saying, ‘It’s in a warehouse. It’s a holiday. We won’t be able to get it there in time,' " King recalls. "Then there was a security guard who had keys and let them in, and then they boxed and shipped it out. ... It’s a huge machine behind every whimsical idea."

“It was hard to get our hands on,” Parker says. “We weren’t convinced we could actually get the original dress back, and there were lots of custom issues. We weren’t sure if I was going to fit into it, what it would look like and what shape it would be in. The bird, we had our hands on – we knew exactly where it lived.”

'Nobody could do that but her'

Once they finally received the gown, the question became how to make it Met Ball chic. The solution: accessorize it with a teal cape and gloves. “It had a million different versions until we landed on that," Parker says.

“That’s a perfect example of how you take something old and make it new,” King says. “Sarah Jessica didn’t want to recreate a moment that had passed, and she started to think, ‘What can we do to make it different?’ The dialogue was like, ‘Maybe lose the entire skirt and just do the top?’ And then I would say, ‘But it’s for the audience to remember it, so let’s try to make it still what they remember.’ “

They also discussed Carrie's new veil, and whether the gloves should match her dress or cape. But the biggest challenge of all was getting Parker out the door.

"Lifting that dress up and coming down those steep stairs without falling ? it was complicated,” King says. “I was like, ‘That is a technical actor. She can do all that, and still maintain that royalty and that beauty.’ Nobody could do that but her. Nobody.”

Paparazzi captured Parker filming the scene last fall, and images immediately circulated online. But no one sweated the leak: “You realize it’s going to get out there, and there are tons of surprises that people still haven’t seen,” King teases. “You win some, you lose some.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sarah Jessica Parker talks ‘Sex and the City’ dress in ‘AJLT’ Season 2