Sarah Jessica Parker at 61: The Fashion Icon Who Grew Up With Us

At 61, Parker has not suddenly cut away everything recognisable about herself and announced a completely new “mature” identity. Her hair still has the length, movement and softness we associate with her, but the colour has evolved. Her longtime colourist has used grey blending, allowing brighter highlights and natural silver to live together rather than treating every grey strand as something that must immediately disappear.

That is perhaps why her natural grey hair has received so much attention. It does not look like surrender, and it does not look like a carefully staged declaration about ageing either. It simply looks like a woman allowing her appearance to change without believing that change requires an apology.

Parker has previously pushed back against being called “brave” for showing grey hair, and there is something very sensible in that response. Growing older should not require a press release. Sometimes hair changes colour because time has passed, and a stylish woman simply finds a way to make the new colour belong to her.

Her gala look was custom Simone Rocha, a pale pink floor-length gown filled with delicate floral embroidery and hand-laced ribbons inspired by ballet. Long satin ribbons travelled down the dress, while crystal-covered Roger Vivier shoes, pearls and sparkling jewellery completed the evening. Serge Normant carried the idea into Parker’s hair, weaving matching pink ribbon through the extraordinarily long braid.

On paper, pink ribbons, flowers and pearls could easily sound too sweet. On Parker, they did not. The sheer fabric, length of the gown and sophisticated styling gave the romance enough maturity, proving that women do not have to abandon softness, pink or playful fashion once they pass a certain birthday.

That is where Sarah Jessica Parker style over 60 becomes particularly interesting. She is not attempting to look twenty-five, but she is not dressing as though turning sixty requires a wardrobe of sensible beige either. There is imagination in what she wears, but increasingly there also seems to be self-knowledge.

There is another reason Parker touches a different nerve with older women: she belongs to our cultural memory. Some remember her from Square Pegs in the early 1980s, while others first noticed her dancing through Girls Just Want to Have Fun or appearing in Footloose. Then came Hocus Pocus, and suddenly another generation knew her as the gloriously silly Sarah Sanderson.

But it was Carrie Bradshaw who made fashion part of the relationship.

When Sex and the City arrived in 1998, many women watching were also navigating careers, friendships, marriages, divorces, dating, money and the question of who they were becoming. Carrie’s tutu, impossible heels, flower pins and strange combinations were sometimes beautiful and sometimes completely ridiculous, but they made getting dressed feel entertaining. Clothes were not merely something she wore; they were part of the conversation.

For a woman who watched Carrie in her thirties and is now in her late fifties or sixties, seeing Parker age has a peculiar emotional familiarity. We changed too.

Interestingly, Parker recently explained that she does not normally wear the Sex and the City clothes she has kept in her archive. To her, those pieces belong to Carrie in much the same way that a costume from another acting role belongs to a character. That separation says something important about the difference between being associated with fashion and actually having personal style.

Carrie was often dressed to surprise us. Parker’s own wardrobe can still be adventurous, but there is usually more ease to it now. She can wear an extraordinary Simone Rocha gown one evening, then appear in something much more restrained without looking as though one version is more authentic than the other.

Perhaps that is what grows with age when style grows well. You stop asking every outfit to prove something.

We often tell women that someone “knows how to dress for her age”, but Sarah Jessica Parker offers a better version of that idea. She does not appear to follow a strict list of what a 61-year-old woman may or may not wear. She wears sheer fabrics, high heels, bows, dramatic dresses and long hair because those things still belong naturally within her style.

What has changed is the way she carries them. There is less sense of needing to chase youth and more sense of knowing which parts of fashion still give her pleasure. That is a far healthier style lesson for women in their fifties, sixties and seventies than another list telling us that certain hemlines, colours or hairstyles have expired.

Good dressing after 50 is not about becoming invisible. It is about becoming more selective.

For years, women were given a rather narrow choice around ageing. Keep colouring the hair, smoothing every line and maintaining the appearance of youth, or “embrace ageing” in a way that sometimes seemed to require giving up glamour entirely. Parker’s current look sits somewhere much more interesting between those extremes.

Her greys are visible, yet the hair is beautifully coloured, conditioned and styled. Her face looks like the face of a woman in her sixties, but she still enjoys makeup, jewellery and extraordinary dresses. She has not stopped caring about appearance; she has simply stopped pretending that caring requires looking unchanged.

That distinction may be especially welcome to Satyn women. Ageing naturally does not have to mean refusing beauty. It can simply mean allowing beauty to evolve with you.

Sarah Jessica Parker has spent decades being called a fashion icon, but perhaps she feels most relevant now because she is no longer only selling fantasy. At 61, we can see the years, the familiar face, the grey at the roots and the same pleasure in clothes that was there when Carrie first stepped onto a New York street in impossible shoes.

For women who have followed her for thirty or forty years, there is something reassuring in that continuity. She did not stop being interesting when she stopped being young, and she did not lose femininity when silver entered her hair. Instead, another version of her style arrived.

Maybe that is the real 50+ fashion lesson this week. You do not need to dress like Sarah Jessica Parker, colour your hair like her or wear a ribboned Simone Rocha gown. You simply need to give yourself the same permission she seems to have given herself: keep the parts of fashion that still feel like you, allow the rest to change, and do not assume that your most stylish years have already happened.

Satynmag’s feature on Hannah Waddingham’s fashion and current action-star era is another reminder that bold dressing does not come with an age limit. And check our How to Follow 80s Fashion Again Without Looking Like a Costume also.