Sarah Jessica Parker was this week announced as one of five judges for the 2025 Booker Prize, sitting alongside authors Roddy Doyle, Kiley Reid and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, and literary critic Chris Power. It’s a tall order: for the 2024 prize, each judge had to read more than 150 novels in seven months, which is difficult, of course. Especially if you have other things to do, like attending red-carpet events.
The actress was yesterday evening photographed at the closing night of the Red Sea International Film Festival – where she had been undertaking various speaking engagements in twinkling Oscar de La Renta dresses – wearing a shredded and shimmering column of the same label’s making with a diamanté handbag and gold-tone sandals. It was as if every party-season shopping guide this magazine has ever published had suddenly converged into a single person. Or a strip of tinsel had been granted a wish to be human for the day.
Parker’s relationship with Oscar de La Renta is perhaps even more enduring than her love of literature. It’s a romance that opens with the first piece she borrowed from the brand – look 67 from spring/summer 2000 – for an HBO event in 2000, and continues through to the custom bouffant gown she wore to the 2014 Met Gala, the tulle cocktail dress she wore to the premiere of And Just Like That in 2021, and the airbrushed confection she wore to the Ballet Fashion Gala earlier this autumn. She’s about books and looks.
