Terry Richardson Photographs Sarah Jessica Parker for Harper's Bazaar

You know, you may go the rest of your life without posing with your arm flopped over your head, your hair loose, while wearing a gold sequin cocktail dress. In fact, you may never wear a gold sequin cocktail dress to begin with, with or without an arm pose, particularly not the figure-hugging Marc Jacobs number Sarah Jessica Parker is seen sporting on the September 2013 cover of Harper’s Bazaar. Can you live with that? Why do people choose to wed in overpriced white gowns, the toilet paper sandcastles of the dress world, when they could be wearing sequins? Sequins are what it would look like if colors could laugh and cry at the same time. This culture is beyond me, but I’m foreign so I have a built-in excuse for all my gaps in knowledge and idiosyncrasies. I could wear sequins every day — every minute of every day and what? You’d say under your breath, with a little sideways smile, “I heard they have a different relationship to sequins where she comes from.” Whatever. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. The point is, you’re not wearing sequins. Do you own anything with sequins on it? Does it sparkle good?

In the inside spread which accompanies the cover, the former Sex and the City star is photographed by Terry Richardson (a man with a moustache; he shoots pseudo-porn for mainstream magazines and once you’ve seen his hairy nipples, that’s something you can’t unsee) wearing feathery peacock looks by Oscar de la Renta, Gucci (above) and Chanel. She’s the “boldest bird,” as Harper’s Bazaar put it, and though she’s not literally a bird (she’s a woman), they did photograph her wearing a lot of flapper-era inspired items embellished with feathers and fringe and bold birdish colors, so the descriptor makes metaphoric (metonymic?) sense. Hm. Although when you really think about it, on the cover photograph she more closely resembles a fish. Except for that arm thing she’s doing. Do you know anyone who doesn’t like flamingos?