The Shanghai collections kicked off this week but a visa snafu has left this reviewer grounded in New York for the time being. Still, one didn’t need to be in the room to catch the vibe at Mark Gong’s show, which officially opened the SHFW schedule on Thursday afternoon. Thanks to the magic of WeChat livestreams, and to the many friends reporting live on ground, the show’s setting was easily identified as the living room of one Charlotte York-Goldenblatt. (Formerly MacDougal, it must be said, as it was Trey MacDougal’s Park Avenue penthouse which Charlotte kept in the divorce that Gong recreated for this scene.)
This spring collection was the fourth and final installment of Gong’s Sex and the City saga, which the designer focused on Charlotte, deliciously embodied by the actress Kristin Davis. Ask anyone “which SATC character are you?,”, and odds are no one will self-identify as her, as she was the most traditional, prim and prissy of the quarter—one could even call her demure. “I struggled in the beginning with choosing Charlotte as my last character,” said Gong via voice note following his show, “Charlotte was the perfect housewife with a perfect marriage and kids, but I used to find her cringe.”
Gong’s “Gong Girls” are known for being youthful, playful, and freewheeling—the antithesis of Charlotte. It was this which compelled the designer to move forward with her as his muse. “I wanted to make it about the real Charlotte; her desires, and her wants. Basically if I was Charlotte, what would I do, and what would I want?”
It’s a part of growing up to revisit people and characters like Charlotte and coming to understand their motivations and aspirations. Here, Gong revisited some of Charlotte’s biggest sartorial hits, sometimes literally—like the infamous vintage Valentino skirt her daughter Lily effectively destroyed with red paint—but mostly, to his credit, abstractly. There were cutesy knit sets and classy polka dots and ginghams on silk frocks and wool suitings. There were beautiful and intricate floral appliqués, lots of sharp tailoring, and a couple of fabulous LBDs. It was a decisively more mature lineup for the designer, and it found momentum and singularity where he dressed it down as a true Gong girl would; with graphic t-shirts worn under corsets, hot pants, sneakers, and sexy bralettes to go with otherwise soccer mom capris. His interpretation of the latter, with its mix of laid-back attitude and sultriness felt fresh and right on the money. In the tailend of this “very mindful, very demure” online moment, Gong is asking the right question: I couldn’t help but wonder, was Charlotte the true breakout fashion star of the Sex and the City after all?