It’s somehow the 25th anniversary of Sex and the City, which makes no sense to me because it feels like just yesterday that I was watching the infamous Rabbit episode and having my mind blown as a, shall we say, loosely supervised 11-year-old. (Judge my mom if you will, but at least I was aware early on of the concept that sex should be pleasurable for women, an important lesson that I chalk up entirely to my tenure as the off-screen, middle-school-attending fifth member of the SATC set.)
As I reflect back on 25 years’ worth of Cosmos, ludicrously expensive shoes, and extremely desultory column writing, I can’t escape one simple fact: I’m just not a Carrie fan. This is partly because I’m a textbook Miranda (Stanford Blatch rising, Harry Goldenblatt sun), but without rehashing every sin the show’s central protagonist ever committed, suffice to say that I rarely saw myself in Carrie – except, of course, for when she flopped.
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What kind of flops am I referring to, you ask? Well, there are plenty to choose from – the time she showed up hungover to a New York magazine shoot and ended up being captured for posterity alongside the sneering headline “Single and Fabulous?” springs to mind – but the ne plus ultra of Carrie Bradshaw failures has to be the time she turned into what Stanford called “fashion roadkill” on the catwalk while walking (or attempting to walk) in a Dolce & Gabbana show. Sure, Carrie was cast as a quote-unquote real person in the show (as opposed to a model), but seeing her get all excited to make her runway debut only to absolutely eat it is heartbreaking. Every time I watch the episode, I feel like one of Carrie’s friends in the crowd, anxiously waiting for her to right herself.
Another major entry in the Carrie Bradshaw flop files has to be the time she got dumped on a Post-it. I’m on the record as thinking this actually isn’t the worst way to break up with someone (personally, I’d rather read a note than let someone see me ugly cry in person), but the way she handles that unfortunate event – namely by getting mad as hell, shit-talking her ex to his friends, smoking weed on the street, getting a ticket from a cop, and ending the night with a stoned ice-cream sundae in the company of her besties – is Carrie at her most relatable. It might be weird to say I love this for her, but I do! The picture-perfect, style-icon version of Carrie that existed on so many dorm-room posters in the aughts never did much for me, but she’s endlessly charming in her chaos.
Not all of Carrie’s flop moments are as dramatic as an epic fail at a magazine cover or runway show, of course, but I actually love her all the more in her smaller moments of weakness. When she finds out that her ex Mr Big is getting remarried to a younger, taller, preppier woman, her tearful lament – “She’s shiny hair, Styles section, Vera Wang, and I’m the sex column they run next to the ads for penile implants” – is genuinely moving to me, because who among us hasn’t felt that way? For that matter, who among us hasn’t also spent money we don’t have on a hot outfit to show up our ex’s new partner or accidentally gotten drunk in the Vogue office? (Just me on that last one? Okay, but in my defence it was at the company holiday party.)
As a new resident of Los Angeles, I hold a special fondness for the two episodes in which the women of Sex and the City decamp for Hollywood only to find themselves missing New York when it turns out everyone around them is intimidatingly hot and they can’t smoke anywhere. I don’t smoke, but I certainly relate to the former issue, and every time I have a humiliating parallel-parking experience in Silver Lake or find myself to be the worst-dressed person at Erewhon, I remind myself of Carrie Bradshaw making her way across the same city two decades ago: forgetting how to drive and hooking up with personal assistants pretending to be powerful agents and getting denied entry into cool industry parties (which, to be fair, she forgot to RSVP to). To paraphrase a niche meme, she’s just like me, for real – and when she’s flopping, it’s easier than ever to root for her.