{"id":1692880,"date":"2026-09-15T16:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?p=1692880"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:44:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T02:44:12","slug":"inside-observers-sex-and-the-city-30th-anniversary-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/2026\/09\/inside-observers-sex-and-the-city-30th-anniversary-party\/","title":{"rendered":"We Loved a Serial Columnist: New York Toasts 30 Years of Candace Bushnell’s Original SATC"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Violetta Komyshan, Lola Tash, Candace Bushnell and Jasmine Lobe Skylar Searing\/BFA.com<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2014a 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014the kind of backdrop that makes a party look like it was art-directed. In a sense, it was; 30 years of Sex and the City, staged with the city itself as the establishing shot. The sun went down. The conversation started.<\/span><\/p>\n

Candace Bushnell arrived the way Candace Bushnell arrives\u2014all force, no warm-up\u2014in 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tash\u2014co-founder of MyTherapistSays, the meme account that lobs sharp, over-observed one-liners (<\/span>\u201c<\/span><\/i>When I win the lottery, I\u2019m going to buy LinkedIn and then turn it off<\/span><\/i><\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/i>) at eight million followers every few hours\u2014drifted toward a table where publicist Ana Martins had laid out a glittering spread of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique Constant gold watches with turquoise and mother-of-pearl dials catching the last of the light. \u201cGive me your wrist,\u201d Martins said, clasping the Swiss-made masterpiece onto Tash\u2019s wrist. It wasn’t really a request, but nobody resisted.<\/span><\/p>\n

The panel itself was moderated by Jasmine Lobe\u2014actor, model and Observer’s own party reporter<\/a>\u2014seated alongside Bushnell, Tash and Violetta Komyshan, a professional ballerina turned content creator with over half a million followers. Behind all four, the St. Regis glowed gold as the sky went from blue to black\u2014the 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 column on the front page of the peach-colored paper.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn’t a sex column,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn’t about the nuts and bolts of sex, which is boring. It’s about social anthropology\u2014the 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<\/em>. The inspiration was all the great writers who lived in New York. It was about the city. And one of the things Peter understood\u2014something that’s true of New Yorkers generally\u2014is that they like reading about themselves.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He let her write whatever she wanted, she said, within reason. \u201cSomeone once pitched a party where all the men wore diapers and sucked pacifiers, and the women dressed as nurses.\u201d A pause. \u201cNo thanks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“That was about the original Charlotte,” Bushnell interjected.<\/span><\/p>\n

“The theme was that you need to leave New York to be in a relationship,” Lobe added.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Which is funny,” Komyshan said, “because my boyfriend now lives in London.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“How did you meet him?” Lobe asked.<\/span><\/p>\n

“On Instagram.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The panel moved on. \u201cDating has gotten worse.\u201d \u201cI hear the apps are going out of style?\u201d And then Bushnell, unbothered, on the line from her own column that still gets quoted back to her: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lobe had her own war story<\/a>. \u201cI had an editor once\u2014a male, we didn’t exactly see eye to eye\u2014who tried to change ‘the night before my b-day, I gave my ex Jerry a BJ’ to ‘the night before my birthday, I gave my ex Jerry a blow job.’ He said \u2018BJ\u2019 cheapened it.\u201d She’d pushed back. “I’ll give you BJ,” the editor finally agreed \u2014 though he insisted on spelling it like bee-jay. Like blue jay. Back and forth it went. \u201cI’m not an expert on blow jobs,\u201d Lobe told him. \u201cWe\u2019ll send this befuddling question to the copy desk,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we’ll take a poll.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bushnell, warming to the theme of everything that’s been lost: \u201cThe 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\u2014you never said no, because you had to be there to experience it.\u201d 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\u2014worried 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\u2014if anything, the incentives ran the other way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNobody wants to read about the mechanics of sex,\u201d Bushnell said. \u201cIt was about people. The anthropological side of New York nightlife.\u201d Did people want to be written about, back then? \u201cOh, sure.\u201d Was there backlash? \u201cComments? There weren’t comments. There were letters to the editor.\u201d Buried in the New York Observer\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s the deal with this Candace Bushnell stuff? Cellular phones, fashion models, moguls, young up-and-comers who can’t get laid\u2026… 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.\u201d \u2014 RICHARD\u00a0 from Coronado, California.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cI’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.\u201d \u2014 JOHN from the Bronx<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat 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.\u201d \u2014 JOHN from Manhattan.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cNobody reads anymore,\u201d Bushnell sighed at one point, only half joking. \u201cI couldn’t have done this column in 2026.\u201d 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. \u201cThe column was never about sex,\u201d she said again, like it needed repeating for a generation raised on the wrong assumption.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not everyone was performing the same choreography<\/span>. 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. <\/span>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.<\/p>\n

Jim Coleman\u2014now just a friend, though he dated Bushnell decades ago\u2014worked 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?<\/em> “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\u2014her new venture into high jewelry, “all one-of-one,” Blumenthal said, letting them look. <\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cDid you see the feature on Tom?\u201d Hoover\u2019s husband, the artist Tom Sachs, had reportedly requested Observer’s own Elisa Carollo by name to cover his <\/span>unofficial rendition of Chanel\u2019s 31 Rue Cambon in Chinatown<\/span><\/a>. \u201cOh?\u201d Hoover said, giving nothing. (Tom Sachs, for the record, is the least interesting thing about Sarah Hoover.) \u201cAnyway, what are you working on?\u201d she deflected. \u201cDid you know Sarah wrote a book about motherhood? The most amazing book about motherhood.\u201d Hoover, again, deflected: \u201cObserver\u2019s review was my favorite.\u201d (The thing about Sarah Hoover is that she isn’t afraid to complain about her husband\u2014and while everyone claims to do that, almost nobody does it as eloquently, or as heartbreakingly funny, which is exactly <\/span>what makes her worth writing about<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The rest of the party sorted itself into its usual constellations. Gary Spitalnick\u2014who co-founded REAL, a private aviation charter company built on an ultra-high-net-worth client base\u2014put it plainly when asked why he wanted to host a night like this: \u201cMost of our events are around sports. We’re thrilled to celebrate something as iconic as Sex and the City.\u201d Carson Griffith, whose fast-rising Rich People Shit<\/a> 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\u2014who manages PR for Dante Aperitivo, Dante Mayfair at Claridge\u2019s in London, the soon-to-open Dante Elizabeth Street and others\u2014half the restaurant industry in New York was accounted for in one corner of the terrace. On one of the plush gray sofas, Ornela March <\/span>sat hunched over her phone. \u201cI am an introvert,\u201d she said when asked how she ended up here. \u201cLola,\u201d was her one-word explanation. \u201cYou didn’t invite my ex, did you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe 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.\u201d Bushnell might argue the anthropology never stopped\u2014it just moved platforms.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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