“So many shoes and only two feet,” laments Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker (Ohio, United States, 59 years old), in one of the chapters of Sex and the City. Her love/obsession with footwear is a constant in the plot. “You’re telling me I spent $40,000 on shoes and I don’t have a place to live? I’m literally going to have to live in my shoes…”, is said in another episode, not to mention that it is shoes, specifically luxurious blue Manolo Blahniks, that Big offers her to declare his love instead of the classic engagement ring. Something or a lot of Bradshaw rubbed off on Parker when in 2014 she decided to launch her own eponymous footwear brand with George Malkemus, the then director of Manolo Blahnik in the United States ―who died in 2021―, as a partner. “In some silly way, I think it’s what people expected of me because of Carrie Bradshaw,” the actress declared a decade ago, when she announced the birth of the brand. On August 16, however, it was her turn to announce its end. “After 10 colorful years, SJP by Sarah Jessica Parker has made the difficult decision to close its doors this fall,” the statement shared with the media said.
The brand’s last remaining store in the United States, located at 385 Bleecker Street in New York, closed its doors on August 25. In the meantime, it still has physical branches in Dubai, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and shopping on-line will remain available until a date yet to be determined. “The SJP Collection team expresses its enormous gratitude to all its loyal customers and followers, as well as to all those with whom they have worked,” the company said in its farewell. Since this announcement, The brand has reduced the price of its shoeswhich previously sold for more than 600 euros on average, by 25%.
Parker is known for wearing her own shoes on red carpets. In October 2023, for example, she and her husband since 1997, Matthew Broderick, attended an event at the New York City Ballet and the actress wore a Carolina Herrera dress with a pair of sandals from her collection, designed to be worn unpaired – one was black and the other pink. She has also worn her brand’s shoes in fiction: in June, for example, she filmed a scene in And Just Like That… —the sequel to Sex and the City— on the streets of New York’s Soho in a pair of mismatched black and white polka dot SJP heels. In fact, Bleecker Street is close to Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment, which made it easy for the store to become a tourist stop for fans touring the show’s filming locations in Manhattan. However, that seems to have not been enough for the firm’s survival, although the reasons for its closure have not yet been shared.
“As fans of the original series know, fashion, and specifically footwear, has always been a very important part of the story, especially for my character,” Parker said in an interview with FootwearNews in 2022. “Having known Carrie so intimately, I felt privileged to be in a position where I could work with George (Malkemus) to design shoes from the ground up that were true to both her passionate love of footwear and her evolving character,” she clarified. This entrepreneurial dream has now been cut short. However, Parker has diversified her entrepreneurial side with other ventures, including her beauty, wine, cocktail and literature brands, which continue to operate.
Shoes may be the actress’s most successful business, but her entrepreneurial side has many other aspects. Just look no further. in the biography of your Instagram profilewhere he has almost 10 million followers, which is nothing more than a succession of profiles for all his projects. One of them is that of Invivo X, SJPthe wine brand she launched in 2019. “The cheekiness of New York combined with the best wine regions in the world,” she advertises on social media, thus joining the growing trend of celebrities creating their own brand of alcoholic beverages. In fact, she has also teamed up with the American cocktail and spirits brand Thomas Ashbourne to launch a line of Cosmopolitans — Carrie’s favorite cocktail in the series — called The Perfect Cosmo by SJPwhich she provided free of charge to the customers of her shoe store in New York, where she herself sometimes went to work as a saleswoman.
Another of his lesser-known businesses is the from the publishing house SJP Litfocused on “broad, deep, thought-provoking and debate-inducing stories that include international and underrepresented voices,” as it is presented on their website. The label was born in 2016, within the independent publishing house Zando. “I have always liked reading for the same reason that I love acting, because of the belief that other people’s stories are more interesting to me than my own,” he explained at the time. The New York Times.
The actress has also launched products with beauty, cosmetics, perfumes, fashion brands… In 2018, for example, she partnered with the store on-line Gilt to bring to market her own bridal collection “for non-traditional modern brides,” as was her character in Sex and the City. There is a lot of Bradshaw in all of Parker’s businesses, at least in terms of promotion and marketing refers to.
