WE could all do with a touch of glamour – and you don’t get much more deliciously frivolous and escapist than Sex and the City, which returns in time for Christmas.

Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte will once again sashay down New York’s Fifth Avenue arm-in-arm to dish the dirt on their love lives over cocktails. Only Samantha will be missing after actress Kim Cattrall turned down the television spin-off, And Just Like That…

The new series will follow the women now in their 50s – we first met them in their 30s – as they navigate their complicated relationships and the ups and downs of female friendship.

It’s been 17 years since the series went off air and we last saw newspaper columnist and shoe obsessive Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Upper East Side princess Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and hard-boiled lawyer Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) – although there were feature films in 2008, in which Carrie finally married Mr Big, and a sequel in 2010.

SATC was so successful it helped HBO become the success it is today, winning seven Emmy Awards, eight Golden Globes and three Screen Actor Guild Awards, and being listed as one of the best television series of all time by both Time and TV Guide.

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There have been tantalising glimpses of shots from filming on the streets of New York featuring the three friends, but mostly Sarah Jessica Parker, in a variety of fashion forward outfits. There’s also a new friend, Lisa Todd Wexley, played by Nicole Ari Parker, to take the place of the sexually rapacious PR, Samantha Jones.

The once very white cast is much more ethnically diverse to reflect calls for more opportunities for BAME actors. Laudable, of course, but I wonder how the scriptwriters will navigate the sensitivities of a younger generation who may be less tolerant of the explicit sexual jokes and 1990s attitudes displayed in the original series?

When it first aired in 1998, SATC felt liberating for women, with its emphasis on female friendship and the independent women showing you don’t need a man to rescue you. I hope the new series hasn’t lost its bite or willingness to say the unsayable that both shocked and delighted SATC viewers first time round.

One storyline would have tipped today’s youngsters over the edge – Carrie broke up with a younger man after he revealed his bisexuality and she couldn’t handle his and his friends’ progressive mentality about gender fluidity.

Teasers released by HBO don’t give much away about the new series, other than Carrie no longer writes for the fictional New York Star newspaper – I would love to know how she afforded all those Manolo Blahnik heels and a Manhattan apartment on a freelance journalist’s salary – but now has a suitably modern podcast.

Reassuringly, Carrie’s serious love interests are back on the scene, with rumours that she’s now divorced Mr Big, played by Chris North, although there was a sneak picture where they are embracing. Fans were thrilled and appalled in equal measures by Carrie’s fatal attraction to Big whose unwillingness to commit caused her so much heartache and misery. She tried time and again to cure her addiction to cigar-chomping Big with town cars taking him to whatever mysterious work he did in the city to earn his millions.

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And time and again she threw off other suitors who didn’t match up to this Master of the Universe, most notably sabotaging her relationship with boho hippy furniture maker Aidan Shaw, the almost too perfect ‘new man’. With actor John Corbett confirming that he’s back on the scene, the on-again-off-again love triangle will no doubt be a major feature once again.

For me, the biggest worry was that the out-there fashions worn by Carrie and, to a lesser extent, her buddies, would be toned down to be more “suitable” to their age. But, no, they are even more theatrical than in the original series. Carrie et al have not gone the way of elegant and understated actresses when they get to a certain age – no pale greys, soft cream cashmeres and tailoring for them à la Catherine Deneuve, Kristin Scott Thomas and Diane Keaton.

Sarah Jessica Parker, 56, recently hit back at critics of her ageing looks, but her appearance on the front cover of Vogue in a wildly romantic Dolce & Gabbana ball gown, all floaty pink and decorated with enormous metallic flowers, proves she still rocks as a style icon.

In charge of the wardrobe are Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago, protégés of SATC’s Patricia Field, and they’ve done the girls proud with Carrie in precarious Celine platform heels and even the blue satin Manolos she wore in the first episode of the first series. They now make the veins in her legs and feet stand out but who cares?

And the line between high fashion and fancy dress may sometimes blur when Carrie wears a cream Claude Montana jumpsuit with coat-tails paired with an embroidered jacket and take on a Glengarry, a bonkers Frida Kahlo style ethnic skirt with a crop top, or a mannish suit with huge 1980s shoulder pads, tie and waistcoat, but mostly she looks fabulous, particularly in a clinging body-con dress and gorgeous coatdress.

It takes huge confidence to carry off outfits like these – and the Sex and the City women have it in buckets, which is why we love them and can’t wait for their return

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