Role of a Lifetime

Why Sarah Jessica Parker keeps playing Carrie Bradshaw.

- By Rachel Syme. Photograph by Pari Dukovic

In all oh her professional endeavors, including the "Sex and the City" franchise, the fifty-eight-year-old actress considers herself a "bitter ender".

On a recent Thursday afternoon at SJP Collection, a tiny, pink, candle-scented shoe boutique in Manhattan's West Village, the store's owner, the fifty-eight-year-old actress Sarah Jessica Parker, was working the floor. "Stuff the toes with this," she said, holding a wad of tissue paper up to a bride-to-be who was wedding-shoe shopping with her mother. The young woman had selected a pair of white lace Cosettes ($450), a heeled Mary Jane with a rhinestone buckle. Parker was eagerly explaining how to store them between wears. She had on the same design along with her everyday "uniform," a studiously distinctive take on jeans and a T-shirt: 7 for All Mankind denim, a cotton top that she cuts at the neckline and ruches with safety pins, and a charm necklace twisted through the strap of her bra so that the chain falls at her left breast, like an eccentrically long lapel pin. Her highlighted blond hair was pulled back into a tight chignon. She packed the Cosettes into a box and handed them to the women.

"Wear these in good health!" she said, doing the slightest curtsy.