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Will Birmingham’s Carrie Bradshaw Please Stand Up?!
12th May 2009. Posted by Tara Tomes. Trackback
I have just come back from a fabulous week in New York City and being my first time in The Big Apple, I have found it pretty difficult to shut up about… all that shopping and sightseeing, what a dream!
My addiction to all-things-Manhattan is mostly down to a little lady called Carrie Bradshaw, closely followed by Whitney Port… who wouldn’t want to go to ‘The City That Never Sleeps’ with icons like that walking the streets.
We all know that NYC is famous for its shopping and as a self-confessed shopaholic, I’m sure you can guess what I was going for. I pretty much walked the length and breadth of Manhattan (and even a bit of Brooklyn, but don’t tell anyone!) taking in the sights and sounds. Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks… my hard-earned US Dollars were spent in all of them. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy my transatlantic purchasing but it was all a bit of an anti-climax.
New York City is, by far, one of the most impressive places I have ever been to… there is an all-encompassing energy about the city and the people there. But what I failed to see was the uniqueness about its retail industry.
The weak exchange rate may have something to do with it; everything was pretty much the same price as back in England. But I felt it lacked that glamour seen on TV. Sure, the shops were big and impressive, but regardless of what store I went in, I didn’t see much that you couldn’t find on the streets of London, Manchester or Birmingham. I did find the odd independent shop in Greenwich Village that housed fun dresses and handbags, but there was still no sense of have-to-have-it about any of it.
Whilst in New York, I did what any self-confessed shopaholic would do; I spent three (very excited) hours on the Sex and The City tour. Aside from visiting some of the show’s most famous hangouts, I also learnt about what the program did for the city of Manhattan. Programs like Friends, Will & Grace and Gossip Girl are all based there but Sex and the City is the only one of these to actually use the city to its full potential. Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda spent ten years showing off the streets, shops, bars, clubs and restaurants of Manhattan for us all to enjoy. And boy, did it do the job… people come from far and wide to walk those streets and shop in Manolo Blahnik. But despite the infamous names to come from the US, even the Sex and the City producers preferred Blighty’s homegrown; Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney.
This got me thinking – if both me and the SATC stylist Patricia Field prefer Britain’s fashion talent, then why aren’t we making the most of it?!
Like New York, London is always the first-choice for anyone visiting Britain, but we all know how Birmingham’s image suffers. The one thing I always hear from outsiders is that they are pleasantly surprised at the wealth of culture and the diversity of Birmingham, so all we need now is our very own Sex and the City. Organisations like Advantage West Midlands and Screen WM are working hard to promote Birmingham’s cultural offering, and it is fantastic that we have programs like Survivors, Hustle and even Gok’s Fashion Fix filming here. But we need that ‘one big thing’ to raise the profile of the city. I think we had all looked to events and festivals to do this, but maybe all we need is our very own Carrie Bradshaw. Surely she’s lurking in the background of one of our shops; we do have over a thousand retailers in the city centre alone, after all…