I am now dangerously close to the age Carrie Bradshaw was at the beginning of Sex and the City. When I first watched the show, I never believed I would get to that age. It seemed ridiculous, fantastical! (In my defence, I was thirteen). I imagined that if I did, by some twist of fate, manage to become an adult woman, my adult womanhood would look exactly like the adult womanhood of SATC. I would have my own apartment in Manhattan (or the equivalent, Oxford Street?) and stuff it full of ridiculous couture and sleep with lots of people and fall in and out of love all the time and have friends I adored more than any of the men I fell in and out of love with and we would all wear Manolos and I would fund this with a single column I’d write for Vogue. Of course, that didn’t happen.
Like many millennials I have never been able to afford to live alone. In the brief period I did manage to move to New York I lived in an illegal Airbnb sublet where the landlord intermittently cut off our Wi-Fi, and I worked (also illegally) at a tech start-up which left me too poor to buy groceries, never mind Louboutins. I do have friends that I adore – Charlotte’s speech on “platonic soulmates’’ is perhaps the one that holds up best from the entire series. And I do write columns, but they don’t pay my rent, which is stratospheric. In 1999, when SATC first aired, a Manhattan one-bed like Carrie’s averaged at $1,250 a month. It’s now $5,200. That’s if you can even find it. A generation and a spiralling housing crisis on, you’re more likely to be shacking up in barely there “studios” with beds in the kitchen, or living with strangers off SpareRoom.com than storing your shoes Carrie-style in an unused oven and luxuriating in “I couldn’t help but wonder…” personal essays to pay for your cosmopolitans.
In fairness, Carrie and co never lived through a pandemic that left them rushing back to their parents’ houses to “save money” only to find the metropolis they’d fled from was more expensive and inhospitable than ever when they attempted to return. It’s hard to find the glamour of living with your parents well into your twenties and 30s, certainly when it comes to sleeping with people in their spare room. Even if you managed to scrimp and save on rent, you still couldn’t live the sartorial lifestyle Carrie enjoys. Designer prices, notably for some of costume designer Patricia Field’s favourites, like Vivienne Westwood, have skyrocketed since the show’s noughties heyday, and social media hypebeast culture means that Carrie’s “if you know you know” fashion and luxury knowledge is increasingly archaic too. It’s not cool to have Tabis if every fifteen-year-old on TikTok already has Tabis, you know?
But I’m rewatching the show right now, like many people, and trying to understand why it still appeals. It’s partly nostalgia, of course. We’re obsessed with all things Y2K. Where Paris Hilton and Juicy Couture tracksuits lead, HBO rewatches are sure to follow. But there’s more to it than that. It’s also, I think, because SATC is even more of a fantasy today than it was when it first aired. It was always supposed to be a fantasy: of good sex, good clothes, good housing, good mates. But it increasingly depicts another universe entirely. I try to imagine what a reboot would look like in London today. Four girls in Depop’s finest, downing £14 espresso martinis before going back to their damp flat-shares? Texting their parents to ask for a lend of a hundred quid and ignoring the little notification on WhatsApp that proves the man whose chat they archived, after he choked them during sex and then ghosted them, has finally replied to their drunk messages? Doesn’t quite hit the same way, does it. While Patricia Field’s Gen X audience might have been able to choose singledom and security, for millennials and Gen Z it’s increasingly hard to have either sex or the city.
Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in Belfast and London
