Patricia Field’s New Memoir Dares You to “Follow Your Mind, Follow Your Heart, and Live Your Life”

Patricia Field never really thought about writing a book. After all, words are not her medium; fashion is. But a mix of opportunity, readiness to tell her story, and an excitement for reliving the good old days, pushed the costume designer and stylist toward a different kind of project: a memoir.

“The moments that I put in the book, I remember them strongly for whatever reason. There are certain things that we all remember…. These are the moments that have stayed in my mind. Moments that were felt. I didn’t know I would remember them all in the future, but in the end, I did, and I had the opportunity to put it in the book. Some of it, of course,” she told Vanity Fair ahead of the release of Pat in the City: My Life of Fashion, Style, and Breaking All the Rules.

For Field, an awareness of fashion’s power started early. Her mother, an entrepreneur, worked hard for her success and wore clothes that reflected it, opting for prim and proper looks punctuated by expert tailoring, but Field had something different to say. In hopes of finding her own style, the native New Yorker found solace downtown, eventually embarking on her first foray into retail, Pants Pub, and then her second, Patricia Field, and building a community of eclectic, creative characters, who would one day become household names, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Isabel Toledo. “I hired people who were visual…. I wasn’t looking for résumés,” she says. “I have always been attracted to creativity, creative people. It became sort of a clubhouse, my store, in a way,” she says. 

An aversion to labels—in terms of fashion, identity, and beyond—combined with a fervor for the unique shaped both the company she kept, her own individuality, and the creative spirit forever alive in 14 Washington Place and 8th Street (the nicknames she fondly gives her first and second store). “My mom was responsible for giving me this attitude. She was very independent, and I picked it up from her. Being independent coincides with not following the pack…. I’d rather have my own original idea—a mix of this and that. It’s not recognizable. It’s me,” she says. 

Field’s deep understanding of the intersection between fashion and identity led her to her first costume-design gig. In a series of anecdotes in the book, she details treading the line between “costume designer and dictator” while working on Sex and the City and finding new ways to break the rules on the set of Darren Star’s Emily in Paris. “It’s a creative process, it’s an alive process, and it becomes, many times, a very personal process,” she says. 

Her retelling of fashionable escapades from coming of age in 1960s New York City to the present day are laced with lessons, love, and loss, the personal stories acting as a confessional of sorts. “This was my tell-all…so whatever was important to me, I wanted to include in the book,” she explains. When readers are through, Field’s only hope is that these pages inspire and amuse. “The most important message is to follow your mind, follow your heart, and live your life.”   

Pat in the City: My Life of Fashion, Style, and Breaking All The Rules (Dey Street)