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Consuming like Carrie How Sex and the City shaped the way we shop
The Guardian
|August 16, 2025
Before Sex and the City, the cosmopolitan was just vodka, cranberry juice, Cointreau and lime juice.
Afterwards it was a symbol of girlfriends, sex, flirting and freedom. But it wasn't only the image of the pink cocktail that the show revolutionized.
From the time it first aired in 1998, the show, and to a lesser extent its descendant, And Just Like That, has shaped the way we dress, eat, drink, date, exercise and work. What it did for the cosmo it also did for everything from nameplate necklaces to vibrators, catapulting them to pop-culture phenomenon status. "It was quite startling, the effect it had," said Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, the author of Sex and the City and Us, which includes an entire chapter about SATC capitalism. So what are the items that were supercharged by the SATC universe?
"This was not a mainstream drink before," said Armstrong, "but I think it will forever be a staple on cocktail menus because of SATC. It was the perfect drink for the show: It's pink, so it reads as feminine, and it looks great onscreen." It may raise a smirk with a seasoned bartender, but it still stands for more than the sum of its parts.
This story is from the August 16, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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