Why Sex and the City still defines modern womanhood

When we first met Carrie Bradshaw, she was a 33-year-old living in a Manhattan apartment that no freelance magazine columnist’s salary could plausibly sustain, with a couture-filled closet and a cigarette smouldering between her fingers. Sex and the City premiered in 1998, birthing a cultural legacy that was both radical for its time and one that new generations of viewers continue to find resonant. 

As someone who first encountered the show as a preteen, stealing illicit glimpses on HBO long past bedtime, Sex and the City quietly etched itself into the Mount Rushmore of my cultural imagination, indelibly tinting the lens through which I understood modern womanhood. Today, like Ms Bradshaw herself, I find myself writing this story at 33, a writer living in Manhattan, guilty of harbouring my own unsustainable delusions of grandeur. Coincidence or conspiracy?

Perhaps what makes Carrie so enduringly compelling is the fact that she was television’s first woman antihero—arguably selfish, frequently myopic, often impulsive, and more than a little prone to making disastrous choices. But she was also magnetic, vulnerable, quick-witted, and deeply entertaining. If that sounds like a textbook chaotic female television character to you, you can credit Sex and the City for the work that it did to grant Carrie the same freedom that has been long enjoyed by male protagonists—to be selfish, complex, but still compelling—for that trope.

More than three decades before Carrie Bradshaw, the legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s seminal book, Sex and the Single Girl, had reimagined single life as the site of freedom rather than shame, encouraging women to pursue careers, friendships, and sexual pleasure without waiting for a partner to legitimise their choices. Brown’s book was a scandal in 1962, but it gave a generation of women permission to embrace independence with glamour and wit. Brown gave modern, single women a manifesto to live by, and years later, Carrie did the same.

The cultural reverberations of the show were immediate. The cosmopolitan cocktail became synonymous with the sophisticated urban woman, the Rabbit vibrator became a symbol of unabashed pleasure rather than a dirty secret, and the brunch table became the universally sacred altar of female friendship. The city itself became the show’s fifth protagonist, equal parts glamorous and unforgiving—no doubt responsible for hundreds of would-be magazine writers following Carrie’s footsteps to New York. Most significantly, the show gave voice to women talking about sex, ambition, and heartbreak in public ways, lifting these conversations out of the shadows of late-night phone calls and whispered confidences.

And then of course, there were the clothes. Patricia Field’s styling made Carrie’s wardrobe the most articulate form of character development to date. She wore a tutu with a tank top, a man’s shirt belted into a cocktail look, a Dior newspaper dress that still makes comet-like reappearances on red carpets, cradled sequined Fendi baguettes in the crook of her arm, and always announced herself with the click of Manolo Blahniks that became synonymous with her very name.

What made these clothes extraordinary was their audacity—Carrie never dressed to fit in; she dressed to be herself (even if that looked absurd). Each outfit felt like a page from her autobiography, and she made mistakes in fashion the same way she did in life: With conviction, and with the assurance that it was her missteps that made her unforgettable. Her influence lingers not just because she put many under-the-radar fashion labels on the map, but because she legitimised experimentation, risk, and whimsy as pillars of her sartorial philosophy.

If anything, Carrie’s partners-in-crime only complicated the portrait of modern womanhood that Sex and the City presented. Charlotte’s aspirational, searching femininity; Miranda’s pragmatism and sharp tailoring; Samantha’s unapologetic eroticism. Together, the quartet offered a taxonomy of possibilities, which served as an invitation for viewers to identify with one character, perhaps, but aspire towards another. More importantly, at a time when television shows were more than happy to have one or two female characters in wife/mother/sister roles—always likeable and acquiescent—the show was unafraid to boldly go where no television show had gone before by creating a programme with four omen protagonists who were imperfectly fumbling their way through life.

In 2025, many young people’s understanding of Sex and the City comes from the way in which it has been endlessly satirised and memeified, with Carrie remaining polarising but still enduringly magnetic. To a GenZ audience, what was once seen as selfishness now reads as a willingness to put oneself first, and her tendency to fail, obsess, humiliate herself, and keep moving appeals freshly to a new generation of women. For these young women, Carrie’s rough edges feel strikingly contemporary, especially given that they have come up in an age where people are both carefully curated and terrified beyond measure of being caught making a mistake. 

The original iteration concluded in 2004, but nearly two decades later, And Just Like That brought (almost) all of our favourite women back onto our screens. Admittedly, the early reception of the show was uneasy—Samantha’s absence felt like a phantom limb, the new characters felt unnecessary and clumsy, and the tone was often uneven. Yet the show triumphed in its insistence that women’s lives don’t end at 50; that they keep evolving with all of their grief, awkwardness, reinvention, and joy.

The sequel reintroduces Carrie not as an ingénue but as a widow, negotiating grief, desire, and loss. If Sex and the City gave us cosmos, Manolos, and three-hour long brunches, And Just Like That tackled menopause, queer parenting, late-in-life sexual renaissances—all subjects that are rarely given their due in the cultural arena. The original was committed to capturing the chaos of women in their 30s searching for the life of their dreams, and the sequel dignifies the chaos of persisting in that search. 

Given the cultural sprawl of its impact, encapsulating the show and its protagonist’s influence on the zeitgeist is a tall order. What becomes clear in examining this legacy, however, is that you can draw a straight line from Brown’s single girl to Carrie’s strappy stilettos to today’s streaming era reappraisals—each insists, in its own register, that women’s lives need not be pretty or perfect to deserve attention. 

For those who are rightfully mourning the end of an era, know that as long as there are women clicking down concrete Manhattan sidewalks in their Jimmy Choos, and intrepid young writers chasing their literary dreams, and groups of girlfriends turning heartbreak into a punchline around brunch tables as afternoon spills into evening, Sex and the City will endure. On that note, if you need me, you can find me in my apartment in the city, writing about women and their discontents, one magazine column at a time.

Lead image: Artwork: Tanya Chaturvedi

All images: Courtesy Getty Images and IMDB

This article first appeared in the August-September 2025 issue of Harper's Bazaar India 


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