When *Sex and the City *first aired in the mid-noughties, you couldn’t open a women’s magazine without coming across a piece calculating how unrealistic her glamorous lifestyle was on a columnist’s salary (mainly because the journalists writing the story knew the struggle was real – as do we).
So while we all know that no, there’s no way on earth she could afford to live in a nice apartment in Manhattan on her own, and that yes, she spends what seems to be a small fortune on cigarettes, taxis and Cosmopolitans, what we all really wanted to know is: how much is she spending on her wardrobe? Specifically, that famous collection of Manolo Blahniks.
In the interests of serious journalism, we put our A* in GCSE maths to good use to work out just how many questions Carrie would have to muse over (AKA how many columns would she need to write) in order to fund her killer shoe addiction.
Miranda estimates in the series 4 episode that exposes Carrie’s shoe addiction that she must have spent over $40,000 on shoes. She works this out by positing that Carrie owns 100 pairs of Manolo Blahniks, which she thinks cost around $400 a pop. So far, so Carrie Bradshaw.
Next up, what are her incomings? How much Carrie earns for her weekly column for the fictional New York Star is never mentioned, but we can do some rough calculations, Miranda-style, to work it out.
As most people know, Carrie’s career is roughly based on creator Candice Bushnell, who wrote a dating column for the New York Observer in the early nineties. A fellow journalist of a similar level of success, Glenna Goldis, publically exposed the same paper in 2009 for their slowness to pay her for two columns she had written. Her fee? $350 per column.
As the series goes on, Carrie’s notoriety and fame only become greater – she’s even offered a book deal and begins earning $4 per word for Vogue – so you imagine that on average, she could have expected to earn at least $400 per column across the six-series run (not taking in to account her new incomings from the book and Vogue).
So without even taking into account her apartment, the fact she has never cooked at home, her designer wardrobe and her penchant for hailing a cab every episode, she would still need to write a staggering 40,000 columns just to pay for her shoes. That’s one column per pair. Which actually, if we’re not paying for anything else, is a pretty sweet deal.
Of course, Carrie was paying for everything else, so it is 100% completely unrealistic that she would be able to afford her shoe habit. Even a cursory glance at the price of real estate in New York at the time would put her rent in the $750 per month region. Assuming she writes a column per week all year, with no holiday, that’s only $20,800 a year – and that’s without 15% income tax being deducted. After paying her rent every month, she’d barely have enough for food, transport and bills, let alone everything else she’s spending on.
All of this actually got us to thinking, Carrie-style... ‘Can we live in SATC fantasy world now too, please?’
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