Sex and the City: a fashion editor’s dream?

Few television shows have had as significant an impact on fashion journalism as HBO’s Sex and the City. The aim of this investigation was, therefore, to explore the complex interrelationships between scriptwriters, fashion editors and the PR representatives of fashion houses that resulted in Sex and the City becoming an international meta-brand. Unlike other work that was concerned with Sex and the City as a cultural text, my approach considered both the material and the textual components of the programme’s success. Too often theoretical approaches prioritise either the production or the consumption of a given cultural product: this work aimed to address both.

Fashion journalism is a subject that rarely appears on the academic agenda, so this study provided an opportunity to elucidate the myriad factors that contribute to the production of mass-circulation fashion text. Specifically, it provided an opportunity to look beyond the surface of the writing to consider the motivations of both the programme makers and fashion editors in making very clear and deliberate links between the text of the show and the external, highly profitable world of commerce. By doing so it was possible to address the motivations, both cultural and economic (for instance, in terms of advertising revenue), of making these inter-textual links, and to consider the benefits to all parties involved for doing so. Clearly the programme, and its associated publicity, spoke to consumers in an engaging way, so this multidimensional exploration of the show’s success also highlighted the role of the consumer, whether as a viewer of the programme, as a reader of fashion publications or as a fashion consumer.

The unique contribution that this piece of research makes to an understanding the relationship between fashion and the media is reflected in its inclusion in Berg’s recently published international text, The Fashion Reader.