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Don’t you just love the cover of this issue? First of all, who doesn’t want to know more about Candace Bushnell, best-selling author of Sex and the City, the book that spawned the popular television show of the same name and the movies that followed.

Pshaw, you say, perhaps feeling you are too adult to have watched the series on HBO and wouldn’t go see the two movies, which have brought in megabucks. Remarkably, both have appealed just as much to those of us who admit to being middle-aged as they do to the young Carrie Bradshaw wannabes.

Sex and the City had many fun and fabulous fashion moments, to be sure, and probably did more for Manolo Blahnik than all of his fashion magazine advertising combined. Fashion is fun, no matter how old you are. Sex and the City dealt with materialism, aging, sexual insecurities, and confusion about how to navigate in social environments that have new rules or, no rules. These issues are problematic for women who have moved well past their 30s and their single days.

Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.

All four women were looking for a man in their life…something that divorced and widowed women may still be doing.

Carrie was a fashionista who overspent on shoes and wrote a newspaper column that was candid about male-female relationships, posing questions that are relevant today. Aren’t men still from Mars and women still from Venus? Miranda was trying to fulfill her career ambitions while falling in love with, and having a child by, a man who may not have been her intellectual equal. Many families are conflicted when a woman wants to realize her career potential. The sexually driven Samantha dealt with her breast cancer. And Charlotte, who never gave up her belief in romance and marriage, found both.

A key component of the series is the power of friendship, which is precious at any age. While these women were looking for the men in their lives, they forged relationships that were as strong as those between men and women; standing by one another through crises that went beyond just being single in a competitive urban environment.

We’re delighted to have an interview with Bushnell in this issue. And we hope you’ll have fun relating to the individual fashion sense of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte. Because there is something in each of them that is probably in each of us—either up front or in our private fantasies.

Enjoy the issue and then, go out and buy a pair of shoes.

—Mary Ann Liebert, President and CEO