We Loved a Serial Columnist: New York Toasts 30 Years of Candace Bushnell’s Original SATC
The line started on the sidewalk and didn’t stop. By early evening, it ran out the doors of the CORE: CLUB and down Fifth Avenue, a curb full of women in miniskirts checking the sky for rain that, mercifully, never came—a small miracle in a September that had otherwise made a habit of opening up without warning. It was the second-to-last night of fashion week, the air had the first real edge of fall in it, and everyone was headed to the same eighteenth floor.
Up on the terrace, the skyline did what it does. The panelists sat with all of Manhattan behind them and, closer in, the Beaux-Arts shoulders of the St. Regis rising just over their heads—the kind of backdrop that makes a party look like it was art-directed, which, in a sense, it was: thirty years of Sex and the City, staged with the city itself as the establishing shot. The sun went down. The conversation started.
Candace Bushnell arrived the way Candace Bushnell arrives—all force, no warm-up—in a rust-and-gold striped knit dress, a carved wood clasp doing the work of a necklace at her throat. Lola Tash came in wrapped in bubblegum-pink satin, Chanel pearl drops the size of Ritz crackers swinging from her ears.
Nearby, a blonde in a plunging bandeau top, more cleavage than fabric, didn’t miss a beat: “I’m on my period!” she announced to the group, flat, almost bureaucratic. “I had to figure out an entirely new outfit for tonight thanks to that.” Was menstruation off the table as party conversation? Apparently not. “Remember how Brooks Nader’s publicist turned her period mishap at Wimbledon into a viral moment?” another guest offered helpfully. “Whatever happens, it’ll be memorable!” She wasn’t wrong.
Tash—co-founder of MyTherapistSays, the meme account that lobs sharp, over-observed one-liners (“When I win the lottery, I’m going to buy LinkedIn and then turn it off.”) at eight million followers every few hours—drifted next toward a table where publicist Ana Martins had laid out a glittering spread of Frédérique Constant gold watches with turquoise and mother-of-pearl dials catching the last of the light. “Give me your wrist,” Martins said, clasping the Swiss-made masterpiece onto Tash’s wrist. It wasn’t really a request, but nobody resisted.
The panel itself was moderated by Jasmine Lobe—actor, model, and Observer’s own party reporter—seated alongside Bushnell, Tash and Violetta Komyshan, a professional ballerina turned content creator with half a million followers, wrapped in a burgundy velvet blazer over a white crochet skirt. Behind all four, the St. Regis glowed gold as the sky went from blue to black—the most expensive backdrop any moderator has ever had to compete with. Lobe went early for the real question: what did Peter Kaplan understand that nobody else did? Kaplan, the New York Observer’s legendary editor, was the one who put Bushnell’s dispatches from sex clubs like Le Trapeze on the front page of the peach-colored paper, and 30 years on, Bushnell still talks about him like he handed her something rare.
“It wasn’t a sex column,” she said. “It wasn’t about the nuts and bolts of sex, which is boring. It’s about social anthropology—the mating and dating rituals of a city that has already self-selected into a small group of people who are particularly ambitious, who care about status. It’s much more Edith Wharton than Playboy. The inspiration was all the great writers who lived in New York. It was about the city. And one of the things Peter understood—something that’s true of New Yorkers generally—is that they like reading about themselves.”
He let her write whatever she wanted, she said, within reason. “Someone once pitched a party where all the men wore diapers and sucked pacifiers, and the women dressed as nurses.” A pause. “No thanks.”
Lobe turned next to Komyshan and asked for her favorite Sex and the City column. “I can’t remember the title,” Komyshan said, “but it talks about people focusing more on work and careers. There was a lot of wit, and at the end, the takeaway was: why can’t we focus more on our careers and also open ourselves up to love in the same way? It still resonates because it’s still current.”
“That was about the original Charlotte,” Bushnell interjected.
“The theme was that you need to be in New York to be in a relationship,” Lobe added.
“Which is funny,” Komyshan said, “because my boyfriend now lives in London.”
“How did you meet him?” Lobe asked.
“On Instagram.”
The panel moved the way these panels move—a little loose, a little live-wire. “Dating has gotten worse.” “I hear the apps are going out of style?” And then Bushnell, unbothered, on the line from her own column that still gets quoted back to her: “The most interesting part was where Samantha says, didn’t it turn you on, watching those people have sex? And I said, not really. All the men looked like shrinks. I’ll never be able to go to therapy again without thinking about a bearded, bald man lying on a mat, getting a blow job for an hour.”
Lobe had her own war story, and it landed harder than anything scripted could have. “I had an editor once—a male, we didn’t exactly see eye to eye—who tried to change ‘the night before my birthday, I gave my ex Jerry a BJ’ to ‘the night before my birthday, I gave my ex Jerry a blow job.’ He said ‘BJ’ cheapened it.” She’d pushed back. “I’ll give you BJ,” the editor finally agreed — though he insisted on spelling it like bee-jay. Like blue jay. Back and forth it went. “I’m not an expert on blow jobs,” Lobe told him. “We’ll send this befuddling question to the copy desk,” he said. “And we’ll take a poll.”
Bushnell, warming to the theme of everything that’s been lost: “The 1990s were different because you actually had to go out every night. You couldn’t post from your bed. If you got invited, you went—you never said no, because you had to be there to experience it.” Her first column, famously, was a dispatch from a sex club called Le Trapeze, filed over the objections of a source who begged her not to run it—worried the publicity would ruin the place. Thirty years later, in a room where most venues would kill for that kind of publicity, the instinct reads almost quaint. Every few feet, another beautiful young thing spun, froze, smiled, and posed for a camera that was always, somehow, already there. Nobody needed to beg for coverage tonight—if anything, the incentives ran the other way.
It wasn’t only a party—it was an argument, gently made, about what’s changed.
“Nobody wants to read about the mechanics of sex,” Bushnell said. “It was about people. The anthropological side of New York nightlife.” Did people want to be written about, back then? “Oh, sure.” Was there backlash? “Comments? There weren’t comments. There were letters to the editor.” Buried in the New York Observer’s own archive are the letters readers sent in when Sex and the City first ran, and reading them now is its own kind of time travel back to 1995.
What’s the deal with this Candace Bushnell stuff? Cellular phones, fashion models, moguls, young up-and-comers who can’t get laid…… I don’t get it. Am I supposed to be interested? There are more compelling personalities in a Sizzler commercial. Candace, please, this laptop-at-poolside approach to journalism has to go.” — RICHARD from Coronado, California.
“I’ve read The Observer for approximately six years, and it is, I believe, the most consistently enjoyable New York publication currently in print. That bit of fluff disposed of, allow me now to reveal my purpose in writing. Candace Bushnell. This woman is too marvelous. There aren’t adjectives to begin to describe her fine contributions to your paper.” — JOHN from the Bronx
“What an amazing piece of reporting from Candace Bushnell. Oh, and that she looks positively delicious in black boots and a towel. Keep up the good work, and please renew my subscription.” — JOHN from Manhattan.
“Nobody reads anymore,” Bushnell sighed at one point, only half joking. “I couldn’t have done this column in 2026.” The reasons stack up fast: everyone’s identity is public within minutes, no venue stays hot longer than the time it takes the influencers to arrive and leave, and everyone overshares before a writer even has to ask. “The column was never about sex,” she said again, like it needed repeating for a generation raised on the wrong assumption.
Not everyone was performing the same choreography. A dapper man in a black ten-gallon hat and aviators, broad-shouldered in a blue plaid blazer, held court near the bar, trailed by a younger woman in head-to-toe camel who didn’t seem to mind. Guests stood three deep under the patio heaters, a sea of quilted Chanel and gray Birkins, phones out to capture the skyline as much as the panel.
Jim Coleman—now just a friend, though he dated Bushnell decades ago—worked the room easily, unhurried, a head taller than most of the crowd. “You need to see her one-woman show,” he said. “She’s simply fantastic.” Coleman lives mostly in Palm Beach and runs a private equity firm in D.C. and a real estate and consulting firm in New York. It wasn’t hard to picture him making his way into a column like Bushnell’s. Had he ever been in it? “No,” he said. Their timeline never overlapped with Sex and the City. Elsewhere on the terrace, guests reached for serial entrepreneur Rachel Blumenthal’s wrists, turning her arm this way and that to get a better look at the yellow gold and diamonds stacked there—her new venture into high jewelry, “all one-of-one,” Blumenthal said, letting them look.
Sarah Hoover swept in during the final hour, fresh off a stop at Carolina Herrera and a private ballet performance, trailing the specific energy of someone who has already been three other places tonight. “Did you see the feature on Tom?” Hoover’s husband, the artist Tom Sachs, had reportedly requested Observer’s own Elisa Carollo by name to cover his unofficial rendition of Chanel’s 31 Rue Cambon in Chinatown. “Oh?” Hoover said, giving nothing. (Tom Sachs, for the record, is the least interesting thing about Sarah Hoover.) “Anyway, what are you working on?” she deflected. “Did you know Sarah wrote a book about motherhood? The most amazing book about motherhood.” Hoover, again, deflected: “Observer’s review was my favorite.” (The thing about Sarah Hoover is that she isn’t afraid to complain about her husband—and while everyone claims to do that, almost nobody does it as eloquently, or as heartbreakingly funny, which is exactly what makes her worth writing about.)
The rest of the party sorted itself into its usual constellations. Gary Spitalnick—who co-founded REAL, a private aviation charter company built on an ultra-high-net-worth client base—put it plainly when asked why he wanted to host a night like this: “Most of our events are around sports. But we need to keep the daughters and wives happy, too.” Carson Griffith, whose fast-rising Rich People Shit Substack chronicles the hedonism of the half-billion-dollar set, stood near publicist Becca Parrish, who reps Eric Ripert, Simon Kim and Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar (among others). Between Parrish and Hanna Lee—the force behind Dante’s rapid, unhurried expansion into Beverly Hills, London, and soon Elizabeth Street—half the restaurant industry in New York was accounted for in one corner of the terrace. On one of the plush gray sofas, TV producer Ornela March (Industry, among others) sat hunched over her phone. “I am an introvert,” she said when asked how she ended up here. “Lola,” was her one-word explanation. “You didn’t invite my ex, did you?”
As for the account that, in its own small way, keeps Bushnell’s original project alive: Tash said MyTherapistSays was inspired directly by Sex and the City’s instinct for observation. “We have such an interesting array of characters in our lives, whose tales can be memorialized in these humorous, one-line captions. It’s not as quippy as a really great article. But it’s a modern form of capturing that time and moment.” Bushnell might argue the anthropology never stopped—it just moved platforms.
On the way out, inKind pressed $100 gift cards into every hand, good at any of its 10,000 restaurant partners nationwide, a fitting send-off for a column that was always, at heart, about people going out to eat, drink, and be seen doing it.
