It is quite hard for some of us to remember what life was like before Sex and the City. Forget the guff about female friendship and empowerment - that only came as a surprise to men. No, what SATC - the film version premiered in London last night - really made us realise was that a bastard in a sharp suit is a thrilling prospect even to those of us old enough to know better, and that Manolos matter.

The original SATC was a column in a New York newspaper written by Candace Bushnell in the 1990s. For the wilfully ignorant few who don't know, it charted the exploits of Bushnell's alter ego, Carrie, as she wise-cracked her way around Manhattan parties, immaculately dressed, awash in a sea of Cosmopolitans and mooning over Mr Big, the original toxic bachelor - based on Bushnell's real-life boyfriend. The column begat a TV series and the TV series is now a film.

Pre-SATC Bushnell, now 49, was a jobbing journalist and girl-about-town. Then she hit on the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall trick of turning what you're already doing into a money-spinner. Some of us feel, with some justification, that we too would be good at drinking Cosmopolitans in Manhattan and having dalliances with attractive older men, but the clever thing about Bushnell was, of course, that she got there first; a phenomenon was born.

She grew up in Connecticut, the eldest of three girls. Her own first forays into dating were discouraging. “When I began dating at 17, I assumed that men would be nice,” she once said. The truth came as an unpleasant surprise in the form of her first boyfriend making out with her best friend. At 19 she dropped out of Rice University and moved to New York, with an ambition to be an actress, but changed her mind and turned to journalism instead. She was in her mid-thirties when the book of her SATC column was optioned by Darren Star, the god who brightened our formative years with Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.

Since then Bushnell has concentrated on writing books, including Four Blondes and Lipstick Jungle (and has confessed to loving Jilly Cooper books, for which we salute her). In May 2002 she met her husband, the ballet dancer Charles Askegard, and married him two months later. The groom wore Prada and the bride wore white Ralph Lauren, which, in true Carrie Bradshaw style, she spilt red wine all over.

“We very quickly found we could talk about our thoughts and feelings,” she says of him. “Every day I find out some great new thing about Charles, as opposed to lots of relationships where you find out something you wish you didn't know.”

Given that she is a journalist herself, it seems proper to let Bushnell have the last word. Her website is headlined: “It's a jungle out there. Dress accordingly.”

Wise words. We couldn't agree more.

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