What Sex and the City taught us about female friendships

Caroline O’Donoghue and Dolly Alderton’s deep dive into six seasons of Carrie Bradshaw in their podcast, Sentimental in the City has us all yearning for the TV show reboot - and got us thinking about the nature of female friendships

Sex and the City: During the show’s incredibly successful six-year run, single women were no longer made to feel ashamed of being unmarried

 From fashion to friendship, Sex and the City sold women an alternative tale of romance. Carrie’s big love was not, in fact, Mr Big, it was Manolo Blahnik. In the first Sex and the City movie, retrieving a pair of blue bejewelled Manolo heels was Carrie’s motivation for running back to “heaven on fifth”, where the couple eventually reunited. After shoes, her affections fell firmly at the feet of her girlsquad – Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. 

This affluent, attractive, fun-loving foursome became the benchmark against which young women in the noughties measured their own friendships – superficially anyway. For many women, cosmopolitans replaced Chardonnay, brunch was the new black, and fashion became everyone’s passion. Six series, two movies and more than 20 years later, the iconic show is set to return to our screens with a brand new 10-episode series.