“Happy Clothes” covers her work on “Emily in Paris” and “Sex and the City,” as well as her time as a tastemaker in the 1970s and ’80s underground.
Patricia Field likes, as she puts it, “happy clothes.” If you’ve seen her work, you get it; if you’ve watched TV, you have probably seen her work. The fashion maven is one of the most celebrated and influential costume designers of the past three decades, with “Emily in Paris,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sex and the City” among her credits. Michael Selditch’s new documentary, “Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field” (in theaters and on demand), follows Field as she works on the second season of the Starz comedy “Run the World,” but the feature is really a celebration of her long career.
A movie like this can head in a lot of directions, and a possible weakness of “Happy Clothes” is that it tries to go in all of them. There are conversations with Field’s friends and collaborators, including the “Devil Wears Prada” director David Frankel, the “Sex and the City and “Emily in Paris” creator Darren Star, and the actresses Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and Lily Collins. Field’s work in the past as the owner of a well-known boutique that bears her name comes to life through archival footage and interviews, while observational images show her working with assistants, shopping for pieces and going to sets.
There’s just a lot here. But with a subject like Field, the mild chaos feels pleasantly appropriate. Her taste runs toward the conspicuous and bold, and several interviewees — particularly Parker, who became a fashion icon partly because of her willingness to wear anything Field selected — note that her choices can be shocking at first. Prints and patterns, gems and silhouettes, neons and bold accessories: You never really know what you’ll get when you work with Field.
But that’s why people love her. Her style, as she says, is happy. “I like clothes that don’t die,” she explains, a statement that reveals she’s always thinking about longevity. Field is amazingly energetic — her 80th birthday approaches as the film begins — and she’s interested only in the future, telling someone at one point that she doesn’t keep an archive because she’s always looking forward.
It’s probably ironic, then, that the most illuminating element of “Happy Clothes” is a sequence in which her taste now is linked to her history as a central figure in New York’s underground culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Former employees and customers attest to what it meant to have a place — her store — where they could be unapologetically queer or trans or just interested in fashion, where they didn’t have to hide their identities. Field was ahead of her time in more ways than one, and this history suggests that she has been practicing an exuberant joy her whole career. That, “Happy Clothes” says, is her real legacy.
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