Sex and the City’s makeover is a manifesto for growing old (dis)gracefully

There’s a famous optical illusion that, depending on the beholder, either looks like a young woman dressed up to the nines or an old crone. Is she mutton or lamb?

Settling down to watch the first episodes in the revamped Sex and the City, my 51-year-old eyes were transfixed by the faces of the actresses reprising their hit roles from the turn of the millennium. The theme of And Just Like That, the new show, appears to be “We can’t just stay who we were” (this phrase crops up repeatedly). If so, why the suspiciously well-preserved cheekbones? Why is Carrie, our heroine, still tottering about on the sky-high heels the pandemic relegated — O blessed respite! — to history?

So many of our mores have changed that this makeover seems brave — in the Yes Minister sense of the word. It’s impossible, now, to watch scenes set in lavish walk-in closets without a slight wave of nausea at the conspicuous consumption. As Sarah Jessica Parker purred, “Hello, lovers!” to her vast designer shoe collection I looked down at my beaten-up boots, purchased in 1993 before the first shows were aired, without a scintilla of envy. Landfill, ladies, landfill.

But persisting, I couldn’t help but wonder (to quote Carrie’s irritating catchphrase) could some aspects of these characters’ refusal to withdraw from the scene be worth emulating? Dignity, perhaps, is over-rated when, for older women, it often means shutting up and getting out of society’s sightline.

A depressing theme of the revamp, for me (aside from the men falling apart or falling over) is the decision of previously flame-haired Cynthia Nixon, as lawyer Miranda, to let her hair go grey. According to the script, these people are in their mid-fifties. Must they now make like another famous New Yorker, Iris Apfel, who turned 100 this year, and go all snowy top and wacky accessories?

Because only one, outré brand of defiance seems to be celebrated, if it is being practised by women staring age, quite literally, in the face. An attitude best epitomised by the poet Jenny Joseph’s first line: “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”.

Yes, her prescription sounds fun, all that brandy and making a scene in the street. And you have to respect the ambition of “making up for the sobriety of youth” — by episode three Miranda, delightfully, is having a damn good go at this. But earning indulgence as an old woman seems to require, in place of fading away completely, playing the clown. The poem’s second line completes the imaginary outfit with “a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me”. Get one that does suit you, Jenny. I remember a soft grey number bought by a friend from SATC’s original stylist, Patricia Field, during that era — it was the Platonic ideal of a hat. We viewed it with reverence, like the pink Schiaparelli dress in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means.

In spite of the title, SATC always was about friendship, and about clothes and their power — and even the fashion industry has realised that they don’t have to be new to appeal. The natty little jumpsuit in the first episode is vintage.

We may never recover the old, guilt-free abandon of shopping, but for some of us the joy of the right outfit never fades. A comedian in the maiden rather than crone age bracket, tweeted during the 2020 lockdown that, when released, she would wear her very best clothes every day — what, after all, have we been saving them for? At the Last Chance Saloon party I attended a week ago, sequins and shimmer were an expression of the joie-de-vivre we miss.

As Omicron forces us back into hibernation and the series rolls out, I am seeing less of the skull beneath the skin in the SATC cast — more of the glamour puss than the crone. They are still pals. If Carrie starts wearing purple with a bad red hat, however, I’m out.

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