From left, Sarah Jessica Parker at the Sex and the City premiere in New York; Lauren Santo Domingo with Olivier Theyskens at the Met ball.Photo: Getty Images
Sarah Jessica Parker was not the first celebrity to wear the Nina Ricci gown designed by Olivier Theyskens on the red, er pink, carpet at the Sex and the City premiere in New York. Lauren (Davis) Santo Domingo wore it at the Met ball on May 5. This, as Cathy Horyn points out, is not cool. At all. Actresses have a business relationship with fashion houses: They wear clothes, it’s good publicity for the house, and other people want to buy more products from that house. In turn, celebrities expect to be given dresses no one else has worn on the red carpet, lest the media catch the double and post side-by-side pictures. It’s not so much to ask really.
Sarah Jessica Parker acknowledged, “In the big picture, this is not important … but what they did was so short-sighted. It’s just unethical and disappointing.” Classy of her to note that, yes, it’s just a dress. But remember that time you got upset because a girl was wearing the same dress as you at a party? This is kinda like that, only the entire world saw.
Mario Grauso, president of Puig, the company that owns Nina Ricci, tried to defend the house essentially by saying Lauren isn’t really a celebrity. Horyn writes:
He explained that when Parker and her stylist asked if the dress had been photographed, he had no reason to mention Santo Domingo, a socialite who worked at Vogue and who recently had her wedding photographed for the magazine. “Is Lauren a celebrity?” Grauso said. “It depends on how you look at it.” He said he and Theyskens mainly thought of her as a friend. He then asked—somewhat incredulously, I thought—“Does everybody look at Style.com?” Santo Domingo’s picture (with Theyskens) appears on the site for the Met.
Maybe she’s not a celebrity, and maybe everybody doesn’t look at Style.com. But Lauren is a socialite, making her New York famous, and Style.com certainly gets a good bit of traffic. Not to mention Lauren wore the dress to the Met ball which she attended with the designer. Which we’d say would count as being “photographed.”
Where have I seen that dress before? [On the Runway/NYT]
Related: Pink-Carpet Fashion at the ‘Sex and the City’ Premiere