Carrie Bradshaw’s story may be over, but her clothes live on

Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is known for her off-kilter, singular look that became an integral part of the cultural vernacular. And as a result, her closet of curiosities, both figuratively and literally — whether it was the walk-through hallway of her Upper East Side studio apartment or the museum of a wardrobe in her current Gramercy Park town house — became its own character.

The styling of the other core characters — Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) — changed over time, but Carrie’s exaggerated skirts and hats and heels and dresses remained one of the show’s few constants.

In a nod to that, sprinkled throughout the entire three-season run of “And Just Like That …” were Easter egg references to outfits and accessories from Carrie’s past life, whether you noticed them or not.

The clearest example arrived in the first episode of the second season of the reboot, in which the characters headed to the Met Gala and Carrie whipped out her history-laden Vivienne Westwood wedding gown, with the addition of a teal cape.

“Her closet has so much lore,” said Chelsea Fairless, a founder of the Every Outfit on SATC Instagram page and a host of the “Every Outfit” podcast. “The wardrobe is certainly supposed to be a sort of outward expression of Carrie’s inner world” and does more “storytelling” than the outfits of other characters, she said.

At the start of “Sex and the City,” the show had a small budget for costumes — about $10,000 for each episode, Parker said on an episode of Alex Cooper’s podcast, “Call Her Daddy.” And, she added, “nobody loaned us anything — we couldn’t get our hands on anything.”

Carrie’s character was also fairly undefined. While Darren Star, the show’s executive producer, had envisioned clear-cut personalities for Charlotte (girl next door), Miranda (serious lawyer lady) and Samantha (sex-crazed), Carrie had no “precise identity,” the show’s original stylist and costume designer, Patricia Field, wrote in her autobiography, “Pat in the City: My Life of Fashion, Style, and Breaking All the Rules.” The constrained budget, and a character waiting to be developed, gave Field ample room to experiment.

In the book, she recalls going on long shopping trips to the discount department store Century 21 and vintage stores around the city, hoping to find a “Versace gown or Pucci skirt” hidden among the racks. She would hunt for ways to bring an edge to the show and to Parker’s character, by mixing high and low fashion in a way that hadn’t been done on TV before.

Take, for example, the instantly recognizable look from the opening credits of the original series that features a white tulle skirt that Field spotted in “the five-dollar bin at a midtown fashion showroom,” peeking out “like the frothy crest of a wave in a sea of throwaways,” she wrote.

Field found a full-length raccoon coat at a consignment store for $200, she wrote in her book. It smelled terrible when they found it, but it went on to become a constant staple for Carrie, reappearing many times throughout “Sex and the City” over “everything from a silk shirt and crinoline to pajamas.”

Before signing on to work on the show, Parker negotiated into her contract that she would own almost all of Carrie’s outfits, allowing her to curate an archive that now lives in her storage closet. So when it came time to reboot the show, the producers had a treasure trove to work with that helped bring Carrie and her fashion idiosyncrasies back to life in a way that felt believable, said Molly Rogers, the show’s current costume designer and Field’s apprentice from the “Sex and the City” days.

“We had so much to pull from in the past because she saved everything,” Rogers said in an interview. “People don’t really, all of a sudden, go, ‘I’m going to rid my closet of crinolines, and I’m going to be in something age appropriate.’ You kind of know what you like, and you stick with it because it makes you feel good.”

There is a black, studded belt that first appeared in the first of two “Sex and the City” movies that Parker affectionately named Roger. It then reappeared in the first season of “And Just Like That ….”

Rogers said that on occasion they would pull looks out of the archive, not for Carrie to wear, but to be hung as props in her closet. In the background of one scene, peeking through her rack of clothes, is the mint tulle skirt Carrie wore to see Mr. Big in Paris in the final season of “Sex and the City,” along with the pink feathered heels she wore in the first season of that series.

Recycling looks is also integral to Carrie as a character, who is “deeply sentimental,” Fairless said. “I mean, they’re not giving Charlotte and Miranda these sort of fashion throwbacks.” Another example Fairless pointed to was the pair of shoes that Carrie wore in the pilot of “And Just Like That ….”

“That’s like, the ultimate sentimental costuming choice with her, because those are, of course, from her wedding to Mr. Big,” she said.

In the finale of “And Just Like That …,” Rogers found a way to give Carrie yet another opportunity to nod back at her single, mid-30s personality from “Sex and the City.”

“I knew what I would want to see Carrie in for the last time, the last gasp,” she said: A tulle skirt that she dances in as she walks off screen.