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“Beauty is the cousin of clothing,” Patricia Field tells me. It’s the Tribeca Film Festival, and we’re sitting in a sunken living room completely upholstered in red at Spring Place, discussing the ways she’s brought the color into her signature look. “I like to accentuate the positive,” she says of becoming a redhead in her 40s. “It’s about understanding what your skin tone is and serving it—that’s important.”
It was Vogue alum and Seek founder Sara Klausing who tipped me off about the preceding panel with the “rock star” costume designer in honor of her new documentary Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field, premiering this evening at SVA Theater. Directed by Michael Selditch, who spent over a year capturing Field at work, the documentary features interviews with industry luminaries and actors she’s worked with, including Sex and the City stars Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker and Emily in Paris’s Lily Collins. As we sit and gab about the onscreen hair and makeup that played off of her high-low styling, Field brings up the “coiffed” white bob that defined Miranda Priestly’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, what she calls “the exact example” of a beauty signature playing a pivotal role.
“It wasn’t going to be a folksy style; it was going to be fashion because it was about a fashion magazine, and the producers didn’t really understand that; they only could equate why it was old,” Field says of Streep’s shocking white bob, a look that debuted long before TikTok began cosplay with gray hair dye and the #coastalgrandma hashtag. “And lo and behold, Meryl said, ‘I want to do my hair white,’ and I said, ‘Fabulous!’” Field remembers. “Because it was a statement. As long as the statement is correct and logical, it sells itself.” Ultimately, Field garnered an Academy Award nomination for her work on The Devil Wears Prada. For her individual statements, however, she always chooses color. “When I first started to see some grays in my 40s, I was like, ‘Okay, I need to color my hair,’” she says, noting that a “warm” shade brings her olive complexion to life. “Against my skin, the red is the best—olive can be a little sallow, so it needs a hit.” Decades in, she admits it’s “quite an expensive hobby, but I don’t care because I like my hair red.”
I tell her how the runways were washed with crimson hair and blurry red lipstick. “I have to show you this, as a matter of fact,” she says, pulling a tiny Shiseido box from her bag. “This is my go-to lipstick for at least 20 years.” Field demonstrates how she wets the tiny brush inside and sweeps it back and forth across a little ruby palette. “I used to go to Japan to shop for my store, and that’s where I discovered it,” she says, nodding to her eponymous Manhattan boutique, once a haven for artists, celebs, and club kids. Aside from her makeup-artist friend Ayako topping up her supply, the tiny kit has remained yet another of Field’s best-kept style secrets: “The girls don’t even know about it,” she says with a smile. Until now.
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