Key Points
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Kristin Davis says Sex and the City costume designer Patricia Field “did not like my body.”
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She claimed Field was “frustrated with my curves,” but eventually embraced them.
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Davis’ costar Evan Handler also shared the tough love he recalls receiving from Field.
Kristin Davis is not mincing words when it comes to how she was treated by the Sex and the City costume designer as the “curvier” member of the iconic foursome.
On the Thursday, Oct. 15 episode of her Are You a Charlotte? podcast, Davis — who played Charlotte York on the beloved HBO series and its sequel, And Just Like That— claimed that her relationship with the show’s costume head, Patricia Field, was “rough in the beginning” as she “did not like my body.”
Davis’ costar Evan Handler, who played her onscreen husband Harry Goldenblatt on the show and sequel, was shocked by her admission, saying, “We need to have a word with her.”
“Oh yeah, don’t get me started,” Davis said, adding, “I think it’s fine now… because we have had relationships with all these people for a very long time, as you know. But Pat just has no filter, right? She just says stuff. Whatever is on her mind, she says. And she had come from a world where, you know, she was in charge of everything, right? Like she had her store, and if she did a fashion show, she hired the people. It was her vision without being watered down or changed or filtered or anything like that.”
Davis said, basically, her body wasn’t Field’s ideal vision.
“She would just be so frustrated with my curves because at the time when we started — 1998 or whatever it was, 1997 — everything was straight, like straight. And I’ve never been straight, nothing, no amount of dieting,” Davis shared.
David admitted she did diet a lot while on the show, but found a healthier lifestyle by the time Handler joined the cast in 2002, and resorted to, “This is just what it’s going to be.”
Handler chimed in to compliment his costar, telling her that fans always say, “Oh, you’re that guy from Sex and the City. You were with the gorgeous one.”
“I needed those people in my fittings with Pat,” Davis quipped, noting that she did at the time have Molly Rogers, who worked closely with Field and eventually took over costuming on And Just Like Thatwith Danny Santiago. “That’s why Molly and I have this everlasting, intense closeness.”
Despite Field’s alleged feelings on Davis’ figure, the actress said that, by the time they got to Charlotte and Harry’s wedding in season 6, Field had eventually embraced her curves.
“When I watched our wedding, like, I love that dress. It’s beautiful,” she shared. “Everything’s working and I have hips and it’s fine. It fits. It’s good.”
“I think she had to just, like, surrender that I was just going to be curvy,” Davis continued of the Emmy-winning costume designer.
Davis said that earlier in the show’s run, there was a time where her ribs were protruding as she “just ate M&Ms for a couple weeks.”
“I had no breasts left, it’s just, like, bones and [Field] was like, ‘Great,'” Davis told Handler, who, once again, was taken aback.
“Did you not know that I was going through that?” Davis asked him, to which Handler joked he was more so trying to figure out how eating candy equates to weight loss.
“I wasn’t eating any real food, but it wasn’t healthy,” Davis shared. “I had read that ballet dancers smoke cigarettes and eat candy bars so I was like, ‘Well, if they can do it, I can do it.’ But I wasn’t smoking a cigarette.”
Handler also shared some of his physical insecurities with Davis, and noted that even though he’d slimmed down over the years, people would always approach him to note how much thinner he looked in person.
“I used to go out to dinner in New York and people would actually say to me, ‘You look so much fatter on the show,'” Handler recalled, with Davis saying she experienced the same thing.
“You don’t know whether to say thank you to that or not,” Handler continued, as Davis added, “Evan, for years and years, this is all they would say to me. They’d walk up to me and they would say…”
“You’re not fat!” Handler chimed in.
“Exactly! Exactly,” Davis insisted. “And you would just be like, ‘Ok. Anything else you might want to say to get us out of this moment?’ Like, it’s so awkward. But yes, I went through that for quite some time also. It’s very difficult.”
The whole conversation about wardrobe sparked after Handler admitted he felt like he was getting the short end of the stick when it came to the show’s fashion. Although Harry was supposed to be more of a plain type of guy, Handler was sick of wearing “ugly” suits and ties.
“One of the most successful elements was Pat Field and the clothes,” he told Davis. “And I was being given these, what felt to me at the time, kind of ill-fitting, stiff, not very attractive suits and ugly ties. And she kept [telling me], ‘I’m going to show you the greatest thing ever.’ And I would think it was hideous. And she was, you know, not happy about my lack of enthusiasm, but I was keeping it all to myself.”
Handler noted that, as a newcomer to the series at that time, he just thought to himself, “‘You need to keep your mouth shut and roll with it.’ You know, ‘You’re in their hands.'”
Entertainment Weekly reached out to Field’s team, as well as HBO, for comment.
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Sex and the City ran for six seasons from 1998 to 2004. The series followed the lives of four female friends living in New York City: street savvy newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), confident PR professional Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), cynical lawyer Miranda Hobbs (Cynthia Nixon), and conservative art dealer Charlotte (Davis).
Two spinoff movies were made — Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010) — as well as And Just Like That, which did not feature Cattrall.
Field costume designed the original series and the films, while Rogers and Santiago took over for the spinoff series, which ended its three-season run in 2025.
Of her work on the show, Field told EW in 2010, “When people start telling me I changed the way women dress, I go, ‘Really?’ It’s a very nice feeling, but it wasn’t anything so self-conscious. I was born and bred in New York, so I think the whole SATC idea was kind of made-to-order for me because I’m as New York as could be and this is the most New York series. There was Dynasty, Dallas. And this was a TV series that showed the fashion, the glamour, the life of the women in New York.”
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