Sex and the City: the jewelry

Updated August 9, 2025, by Cathleen McCarthy

When the first Sex and the City movie hit  theaters in 2008, I was in my seat, popcorn ready. The HBO series was  always good for eye candy and a few laughs with girlfriends.  I’d missed watching the adventures of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte after the show went off the air in 2004.

So I was doubly delighted to find jewelry played a major role, in a way that was strangely familiar. Central to the plot was a flower  ring Samantha bid on live at a Christie’s auction.  She’s outbid, it turns out, by her boyfriend, who buys the ring for her via phone.

Unaware of this and increasingly flustered, Samantha bids furiously, as her friends  watch — everyone beautifully dressed, of course. As soon as I saw that scene, I had deja vu. It was filmed in the showroom at Christie’s Rockefeller Center, an obvious reference to the sale held there in October 2006 to auction off the jewelry of a newly-divorced Ellen Barkin — including the JAR-designed diamond Gardenia ring I’m wearing in this photo. Looks familiar, right? (Another guilty pleasure: trying on jewelry before an auction. I also tried on Ellen’s spiky wedding ring, but that’s another story.)

While Samantha’s ring ends up selling for $50,000, Barkin’s went for $486,400, four times the estimate. I know because I was in the packed showroom that night. I was the one in the back row with a notepad instead of a paddle, reporting for a magazine on the mother lode of jewelry by Paris-based designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR).

Those 17 JAR pieces brought nearly $8 million of the $20 million worth of jewels sold that night, twice what Christie’s was expecting. “Crazy prices for everything,” a Christie’s spokesperson noted when she sent me the final, giddy results.

Ah, yes, the crazy spending of 2006. Given the state of the economy by the time this movie was playing in theaters, Ellen Barkin must have been patting herself on the back for her timing. 

Patricia Field, stylist behind the original series as well as the 80 costume changes of the first movie, has reported that she didn’t let the recession rein her in on the second movie either, even though it aired in 2010 when many of us, especially self-employed creatives like me, were still trying to recover financially.

The heady days of crazy bidding wars for celebrity jewels were, at least for a while, a thing of the past. Maybe Ms. Field had the right idea, though. After all, we go to the movies to escape reality, right?

More than 15 years  later, you can still find versions of Samantha’s (and JAR’s) big, glittery flower ring everywhere from Etsy to The RealReal.

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JAR in full flower: 18 rare jewels on the block

JAR: designer jewelry as calling card

Revenge: characters studies in jewelry

Van Cleef & Arpels: glamor and invention