When I was one, I’m told that I would plant myself in front of my closet—a collection of teeny-tiny dresses, tops, and skirts—and point at what I wanted to wear. And I’d howl if I was dressed in anything else. As a 1 year old. My approach to dressing remains the same, though there’s less howling.

By the time I turned 12, all of my efforts turned to one thing: what I was going to wear to my bat mitzvah. My mom drove three hours to take me to All Dressed Up, the same Westchester shop where I got a dress for my brother’s bar mitzvah a little over a year earlier. For my brother’s big day, I wore a wool shift dress in a trio of colors: the top was pink, the middle was cream, and the bottom was brown. It came with a perfectly coordinated jacket. Even in my prepubescent naiveté, I knew I was serving up a total Jackie O look.

But when it came to mine, the sartorial experience wasn’t as seamless. I tried on one mediocre dress after another, discarding each for the most specific—but in my opinion, very valid!—reasons: one was too sparkly, another was too summery, this one was too revealing, and the other was way too matronly. I had reached the point in the mother-daughter shopping trip where a hissy fit was imminent.

Then the shop girl offered a suggestion: They could customize the dress of my choosing. And just like that, the problem was solved, because my dream dress came to mind—a dress that I fell in love with on Sex and the City.

Yes, Sex and the City. While other pre-teens were watching Veronica Mars or Drake & Josh, I had picked up the habit of joining my parents on the couch every Sunday night to catch up on the wild, not-safe-for-12-year-old-girls-to-watch antics of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte. (In my parents’ defense, they told me to cover my eyes during the grown-up scenes.) But I watched mostly because of the clothes, mostly because I didn’t fully grasp the plotlines. I was in awe of Carrie running down the city’s sidewalks in her towering stilettos (I’m still in awe), I thought Charlotte’s penchant for pearls was cute, and I thought I’d dress exactly like Samantha when I got my first real job (luckily for my career, I don’t).

But it was episode 14 of season six that really got me. With absolutely no understanding of how a healthy relationship works, I thought what Carrie and Aleksandr Petrovsky had was perfect. He had a fancy apartment and an exotic accent. He bought Carrie really expensive gifts. He was moody and mysterious, and, therefore, hot. But I was most spellbound by the moment when The Russian attentively listened to Carrie as she recited the description of this Oscar de la Renta dress from the pages of Vogue—sleeveless, silk, faille, full-skirted dress with black patent leather bow belt. “Now that is pure poetry,” she sighed.

And when The Russian casually presented Carrie with the dress—in a huge white box—for a night at the opera, oh my god, I became obsessed with this man. And even more obsessed with the dress.

It turns out, the dress in Vogue was actually some cantaloupe-colored design that HBO had altered to pink in post-production—a discovery made by @everyoutfitonsatc, the Instagram account dedicated to recounting each and every outfit of the series. It was speculated that the HBO execs seemed to be more interested in using an issue of the fashion glossy as a prop than they were of accuracy. Which, in a way, was exactly how my Oscar de la Renta knock-off turned out.

My mother and I agreed that hot pink was a bit too much for a religious ceremony, so we settled on a long-sleeved silk dress in ballet pink and hacked the sleeves off, turning my dress into a tank, just like Carrie’s. We also decided the dress needed a cropped jacket, in the name of modesty. I also swapped out Carrie’s black patent belt for a diamanté belt buckle because, well, I was 12 years old. Later, my mom and I found a pair of pink leather slingbacks with a little kitten heel from Steve Madden that perfectly matched the hue of my dress.

Over the years, my mom likes to remind me that she spent far more money on my bat mitzvah dress than she would’ve liked (it winded up being almost as expensive as a wedding dress), but she doesn’t make me feel guilty about it. She taught me, just like what Sex and the City taught me, that fashion can make a moment. And that moment for me was my bat mitzvah dress.