Independent Perspective News

Sarah Baxter, New York

IT ONLY takes a mention on Sex and the City, the hugely popular television series about four single women in New York, for fashion and lifestyle trends to take off. For five years the programme has defined what is hot and what is not.

High-heeled Manolo Blahnik sandals, Fendi bags and peek-a-boo bras have become icons of style. The terms “toxic bachelor” and “modeliser” (a man who dates only models) have replaced time-honoured insults such as “bastard”. For women, confessing the most intimate details of their sex lives to girlfriends is now normal.

Yet the series, now in its sixth and final season in America, has become dated. It is not for want of trying to keep pace. The first episode, screened last week, had a reference to the British designers Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen, marking their arrival in the New York fashion firmament.

The magic, however, is fading. Like many New Yorkers Alexandra Wolfe, 22, often watches the series with girlfriends over a glass of wine. It used to be a great draw. “I even know guys who have memorised whole episodes,” she said.

Now she and her friends watch “for the outfits and the shoes, rather than the exciting lives”. They neither want to turn into swinging singletons, nor be bogged down by neuroses about motherhood.

The turn-off for her generation was the arrival of two baby boys: a real one last October for Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays the sex columnist Carrie in the series, and a fictional one for Miranda, a corporate lawyer. “It seemed kind of depressing after that,” Wolfe said.

For women the same age as Parker, 38, and Kim Cattrall, 46, who plays the man-eating Samantha, the series is a sobering reminder that their party days are coming to an end.

“I feel like a girl of 35 again,” Carrie quips as she prepares for a first date with a new boyfriend for the umpteenth time. But the characters are now older than the largest demographic group in their audience, which the cable channel HBO says is women aged 18 to 34.

For women of Carrie’s age the 1990s obsession with finding a man has been replaced by anxieties about having a child.

Sylvia Hewlett caused a furore last year with her book Baby Hunger, which urged career women to give birth before their eggs got too old. She said: “It is difficult to sustain the image of the glamorous female predator into middle age. Imagine Samantha in five years. She would evolve into a rather pathetic figure.”

Hewlett cautions that, like Carrie, “women in their late twenties enjoy real sexual power and independence, but by the time you hit your early thirties it is good to be in a different space.” Candace Bushnell, 43, the writer who created Sex and the City, astonished friends last year by marrying Charles Askegard, a dancer with the New York City Ballet. Even she described her lightning romance with a man nine years younger than her as “freaky” after declaring marriage a male invention.

“All New York women can meet a great guy if they’re patient enough,” she said.

In the new series Miranda falls for the father of her baby, whom she once rejected as too weedy; Charlotte considers converting to Judaism to marry her new love; Samantha gets off with a young waiter; and Carrie gets serious about writer Jack Berger. There is at least one wedding and Mr Big, Carrie’s old flame, reappears. The ending has yet to be filmed and even the actors do not know the fate of their characters.

In a previous episode Carrie balked at marriage. “She had a dream where she ripped off her wedding dress because it gave her an allergic reaction,” said Hewlett. “She said she wasn’t ready for commitment. I found that profoundly misleading.”

Katie Roiphe, the novelist and author of The Morning After, a controversial look at date rape, said: “The glamorous spinster is no longer fashionable. In the 1990s there was a new demographic of women who were professional, had careers, knew what they wanted, were single and hadn’t had much representation.”

Since then, as her own life shows, women have moved on. Roiphe, 34, recently married and has a newborn girl. “There’s a movement away from the cult of the glamorous, single 30-year-old towards mommy books like Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It,” she said.

Yet, even with a three-week- old baby in her arms, Roiphe still managed to watch last week’s show.