For Carrie Bradshaw, Success Is in the Bag

Paint splatters may have been tacky on your friends’ prom tuxedos, but on teenager Carrie Bradshaw’s black leather bag, the effect is totally rad.

To salvage the memento of her late mother after it is accidentally ruined by her bratty little sis, Carrie breaks out the nail polish, and voila:  it’s Jackson Pollock meets Stephen Sprouse.  The effect is so striking that, in the series’ premiere episode tonight (at 8PM Eastern), the bag soon attracts the interest of an editor at Interview, and catapults Connecticut Carrie into her iconic Manhattan milieu.

"I had been thinking about interesting ways to develop Carrie’s character and the loss of her mother," explains The Carrie Diaries' creator Amy B. Harris.  "I started thinking, what would her mother have left her that would have been meaningful to her?  I started thinking a purse would be great -- but what if it were to get ruined?"

Harris says her show partnered with the leather goods company Mark Cross, whose purses provided the perfect classic backdrop for Carrie’s avant garde artwork.  "We went to them and asked, 'Would you ever consider giving us two purses we could splatter with paint?'  They just relaunched in the last couple of years, and they were the bags that Grace Kelly used.  So we really felt it was a completely appropriate match of brand and story."

"We asked them to build leather copies of the bag on cardboard, and we created about 50 versions, to make sure we got it perfect,” Harris remembers.  “We ended up putting so much energy and emphasis on it, the purse felt like the last character in the show.”