Love & Passion Quote by Candace Bushnell

Bushnell isn’t nostalgically cataloging TV wardrobes; she’s staking a claim on who gets to define “the contemporary woman” at any given moment. By turning decades into archetypes - the Sex and the City woman for the ’90s, the Lipstick Jungle woman for “right now” - she treats pop culture less like entertainment and more like a social operating system. If you can name the heroine, you can name the era’s anxieties, aspirations, and acceptable appetites.

The move is shrewdly self-referential. Bushnell helped midwife the SATC template, so calling it “the ’90s” is both cultural diagnosis and brand consolidation: her fiction didn’t just reflect a moment, it branded it. Then she pivots to Lipstick Jungle (another Bushnell property) to argue that the post-SATC woman has “updated” without abandoning the core fantasy. The subtext: women’s progress gets narrativized through consumer fluency and workplace power, not through dismantling the system that made these narratives necessary.

Context matters here: SATC’s late-’90s boom rode a wave of third-wave confidence, city-as-playground optimism, and the idea that intimacy and independence could be balanced through savvy choice. Lipstick Jungle arrives in a harsher mid-2000s landscape: older protagonists, higher stakes careers, money louder than romance. The “new contemporary woman” isn’t chasing Mr. Big; she’s managing empires - and still expected to look impeccable doing it.

It works because it’s reductive in a useful way: Bushnell compresses cultural shifts into a shorthand that readers instantly recognize, even if they resist it. The provocation is the point. If your identity can be mapped to a TV heroine, how free were you ever supposed to be?