Lucky Charm

With her new collection for GapKids, Sarah Jessica Parker reflects on the beauty of hand-me-downs

- Eric Wilson

Sarah Jessica Parker has never been shy about the hardships she faced growing up poor with her seven sisters and brothers in Cincinnati, nor how that experience—and the bonds of her family—helped shape the woman she has become. It even plays an important role in how she designs.

“My mom had lots of opinions about how we should look when we walked out the door,” Parker recalls. “We may not have come from money, but she had some pretty grand ideas about how presentable we should be. She had to be very industrious, and very thrifty, to make some of our clothing last.”

Rummage sales, consignment stores, and the factory outlet for Polly Flinders, a bygone label of well-made girls’ clothing in Cincinnati, were the sources of much of the family wardrobe, with clothes passed from sibling to sibling as each one aged. Parker carries on that tradition to this day with her own children, albeit for nostalgic and conservational reasons rather than out of necessity. In a world that is now filled with luxury kids’ clothes and disposable fast fashion, it was this wistfulness for a simpler time that inspired Parker when she set out to design her first children’s collection, in partnership with GapKids.