Observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/09/BFA_55685_8171276.jpg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”” width=”970″ height=”776″ data-caption=’Sarah Cuyler, Candace Bushnell and Hank Stampfl. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Skylar Searing/BFA.com</span>’>
Would you rather be single in Manhattan now or in 1995? That was one of the questions asked at the 30th-anniversary celebration of Candace Bushnell’s final Sex and the City column in the New York Observer, now simply Observer. During Fashion Week at sunset, well-heeled guests gathered atop the CORE: Club terrace to hear Bushnell speak on a panel alongside some of today’s biggest content creators: Lola Tash of My Therapist Says and ballerina and influencer Violetta Komyshan. It was moderated by me, also a former Observer sex columnist.
Bushnell’s column ran from 1994 to 1996 and would go on to spark a cultural phenomenon. She describes it as more Edith Wharton than Playboy, more social anthropology than sex. There are, after all, “only so many different ways people can do it.”
One could feel the seasons changing; the warmth of summer still lingered, but with the beginnings of a chill. New York’s history was all around—across the way was the St. Regis hotel (where Salvador Dalí stayed and Mick Jagger rang in his 30th birthday on the roof) flanked by the Peninsula and a church with its spire rising up just below. Same places, a different time, and yet so many of the same questions.
Guests sipped Cosmopolitans in the waning sun, waiting for the panel to begin. A gust of wind blew by, and the panelists took their seats, backlit by the warm glow of the city lights. Observer’s Merin Curotto introduced the panelists and thanked REAL, co-founded by Gary Spitalnick, for hosting the evening, along with partners Frédérique Constant and inKind. She noted that Frédérique Constant had outfitted the panelists with watches, in what, she quipped, “may be the first time that anyone has tried to keep a conversation about Sex and the City on schedule.”
What was the most Sex and the City thing that had happened to the panelists this past month? I’d been in the throes of talking to a guy on Raya when he told me he was coming to New York. I asked when, and he ghosted me. Tash, dressed in a pink blouse and matching long pencil skirt, had been on a date when her phone fell through a grate. A film was shooting on the street and production stopped to help. The police got involved, too, and eventually the phone was fished out. “My whole life is on that phone. I’m not backing it up,” she said. The saga took four hours. And as for her date? “The poor guy” spent it by her side; Tash called it a bonding moment.
As for Komyshan, she was asked to shoot a video at the restaurant Bibliothèque to help an anonymous man find love. Bushnell thought it sounded like a great reality show, and she would know. For Bushnell, striking in a fitted, diagonally striped dress of mustard, lavender, brown and white, the most Sex and the City thing of late was shooting an actual reality show. The Golden Life, Bushnell said, is about women over 55, their friendships and the understanding that “your girlfriends are still really important to you.”
“Women are always inspiring to me in this city,” she said. “They’re the best and they’re the coolest and they’re all super accomplished.” That, she said, “seems very Sex and the City to me.”
When asked how Bushnell’s column had inspired her, Komyshan singled out “My Unsentimental Education: Cupid Has Flown the Co-op (The End of Love in Manhattan).” An English journalist meets an investment banker who, after two weeks, takes her to the Hamptons to see the house he’s building and meet the architect. She assumes he’ll marry her. Back in England, that would have meant something. Six months later, the reporter gets smarter. “Relationships in New York are about detachment,” she concludes. But how does one get attached when one wants to? “Honey, you leave town.”
“The original Charlotte,” Bushnell exclaimed.
There was a stir in the audience, as though Bushnell had mentioned an old friend everyone knew well. Komyshan added that her boyfriend lives in London. He had seen her on Instagram and asked a mutual friend to introduce them. They met in real life: a hybrid of 1995 and now.
Tash, meanwhile, had been inspired by Bushnell’s anthropological eye. For My Therapist Says, she and her collaborators observe their friends and their interesting tales, memorializing them in humorous, one-image captions. She called memes “a modern form of capturing that time and moment in our lives.”
As for how one actually meets someone, Bushnell still believes in 1990s methods—specifically, meeting in real life. “It’s always been a feature of New York City that it’s a place to meet people in person,” she said. “And that’s really how things happen.” Still, she conceded, “it would be sad to think that’s not true anymore, but maybe it’s not.”
I worried that it wasn’t, that dating apps were making people feel more disconnected and easier to just stay home and swipe from the comfort of bed. Then again, as I looked around at the terrace overflowing with fashionistas, I realized perhaps it was time to take Bushnell’s advice myself. She was firm. “You just have to go out every single night. Don’t say no. If somebody invites you, go.”
Bushnell has also always believed that women should make their own money and not rely on a man. “Now, I feel like this is something that women are really understanding for the first time,” she said. “The industrial romance complex is really, really big in women’s lives and a lot of women really believe in it. And I’ve never believed in it.”
The panel ended with this not-so-simple question posed above: would you rather be single in Manhattan now or in the nineties? There was some hemming and hawing, but everyone ultimately chose “now.” Bushnell did too, adding that if she were 35, writing “Sex and the City” with all those attractive men on dating apps, she’d be having a good time. “Everyone would be like Samantha in ‘Sex and the City’ all the time.”
Post panel, Bushnell’s friend Sarah Cuyler called Candace “spicy,” from “the shoes, the dress and the attitude” to “the consistent delivery of the same message that women are wonderful and empowered and that they come first.”
Nearby, Tash and Komyshan were gathered with friends under a heat lamp. Tash said she was “absolutely floored” to have been on the panel with Bushnell and had been trying to keep her cool. “I’m such an admirer of her work,” she said. “She’s such a great inspiration for so many generations after her.” It was also a full-circle moment. “Our book was based on her book of essays,” Tash said. My Therapist Says: Advice You Should Probably Not Follow, a collection of essays published six years ago, is now being developed into a TV series.
Tash finds Bushnell’s voice and satire “quick and quippy and so relevant 30 years on.” She added, “I think she said that there’s this age barrier. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think she can still hit it and throw down with all the young’uns out there.”
Komyshan, who wore a vintage gray Richard Tyler dress and sparkling, crystal-embellished Roger Vivier stilettos she’d brought out for the occasion, said that being on the panel with Bushnell was “surreal.” “She’s such a character and so cool. Can you imagine what the ’90s were like with this woman? She probably has stories for days.”
“I was born in ’96, right?” Komyshan said. Yet she found Bushnell’s columns relatable, although there was one thing she thought was different. She’d recently seen a woman throwing out a cigarette because everyone “vapes and stuff.” Though she doesn’t smoke herself, Komyshan saw it and thought, “That’s chic.” When she came across one of Bushnell’s columns declaring that love was in and smoking was out, she joked, “I feel like love is out and smoking is kind of in now.”
Then she set the record straight. “Don’t get me wrong. I love love. I’m the most romantic of the romantics.” Her final verdict: “Love is not out, but cigarettes are back in.”
On the other side of the terrace, entrepreneur Woodie Hillyard thought it was fun to consider what Bushnell’s column was then and what it might look like today. “I think dating is such a modern part of life in New York City. It’s the fabric that holds everyone together,” he said. “Everyone has a crazy story.”
As to whether he’d rather be dating now or in 1995, Hillyard chose the latter. “I think we’d all be a little more locked in,” he said. “There’s so much distraction on your screen, and I also think communication would just be a lot more direct.” Back then, “you’d call people. Buzz them.” He smiled at the novelty. “Beep them, and they’d call you, which I do prefer. I love calling people, and I feel like that’s very taboo today.” He also admitted to overthinking texts, and “that just needs to go away.”
What could change this? “I think you go back to IRL and make a phone call okay again.”
Best-selling author Sarah Hoover, whose book The Motherload made waves with its unsparing take on motherhood, mused that if she were single, she’d rather date in 1995. (Hoover is married to artist Tom Sachs.) But then she swung back because in 1995, there wasn’t an app where women could complain when things went south, as they “inevitably would.”
“Men are annoying,” she deadpanned. “And I feel the more ability we have to complain about it, the better off we are, because it’s such a way to bond with other women.” At the end of the day, “it’s about your girlfriends.”
Was there hope, I asked. “Yes. I really think there is,” Hoover said. “I’m a boy mom, and I’m raising my son to fucking listen.”
As the evening wound down, I caught up with celebrity fashion stylist Nolan Meader who said the panel made him fall in love with New York even more. “It’s a place of characters. Nobody boring lasts here long.” As for Bushnell, Meader felt there were very few people who had changed the landscape of the city the way she had. She “paved the way” for women to be more empowered and in charge of their lives, and had inspired millions of women and gays to come to New York to live theirs. He added that she was also responsible for Manolo Blahnik becoming part of the cultural zeitgeist. “You’re not a New Yorker unless you own a pair,” he joked.
When it came to dating, Meader thought people in New York were more secure being themselves, and perhaps there was less focus on finding someone because they were more content with the lives they had built. “I certainly feel that way,” he said. “If I find someone, I find someone. If I don’t, I’ve got the best friends in the world, and I live in the greatest city in the world… And I think Candace Bushnell is very responsible for that.”