From The Sunday Times
April 18, 2010
Sex and the City's Candace Bushnell on reinventing Carrie Bradshaw
Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell returns with a new take on her best-known character, but her own life has moved on from cosmos and casual flings
Shane Watson

 

Photo by Micaela Rossato

Candace Bushnell is perched on a white leather chaise in the middle of a studio on E 4th Street in New York, posing kittenishly for the camera. Her big hair is four shades of honey blonde, and she’s wearing 5in-high Louboutins and a frothy doll of an Oscar de la Renta dress so see-through, it requires an inbuilt modesty-preserving pelmet. It’s hard to believe this sample-size woman with buffed, blemish-free skin is a mere writer. But then, this is no ordinary writer, this is the woman who created Sex and the City, the real Carrie Bradshaw. So tricky fashion and flirting with the camera are second nature.

Fast-forward three hours and she is back in her own clothes — ripped jeans, T-shirt, Louis Vuitton suede trainers — looking very upmarket-casual, though her cornflower-blue eyes (which match the blue crystal trim on her BlackBerry) are sharp as a wolf’s. This, she says, is the real her, only without the backcombing. “You know, at my house in the country, I don’t do any of this,” she says, tucking her legs up onto the sofa beside her. “When I’m out walking my dog, my hair probably isn’t even styled. I’m just like any other middle-aged woman.”

Incredibly, Bushnell is 51. It’s a shocker, because Carrie Bradshaw is frozen in our imaginations at the age of roughly 35, and because Bushnell has, as the stylist puts it, “a really youthful vibe”, for which, read a cracking figure and a good Botox doctor. (“Oh, Botox, sure!” she says, astonished that I would even bother to ask. “Plastic surgery? I haaaven’t had it yet,” she drawls, “but I may.”) Would she still wear a silver minidress, like the one she has just been modelling for the shoot? “Maybe, for, like, one night out.” She looks a little doubtful. Time has moved on, and so have her priorities. “There are certain things that one doesn’t have to do any more. In your twenties, the opposite sex is very important. You are more concerned with how you look. Do you have the right bag? Do you fit in? When you get older, you stop caring as much about what people think. I guess it’s Boodism [Buddhism]. Boodism in your twenties doesn’t work; when you’re in your fifties, it just happens naturally.”
Read the full story at the Sunday Times.