And Just Like That, the clumsy Sex and the City reboot watched by many and adored specifically by the unwell (me), has brought a ghost back. On episode seven of the show’s second season, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw has a Valentine’s Day dinner and implied Valentine’s Day sex with her erstwhile ex-fiancé, Aidan Shaw, played by John Corbett. Mr Big is angrily splashing in a mud pit up in heaven. Or hell.
Aidan was introduced to SATC audiences in season three, after one Stanford Blatch spots him in the New York Times Style section. “There’s a beautiful man downtown selling beautiful furniture,” he tells Carrie. “We’re going.” Once Stanford assures her that the beautiful man is straight, Carrie throws on her patchwork Illia coat and heads to a sunny furniture store packed with horny shoppers. And then she sees Aidan – all 6-foot-5 of him – clad in a denim shirt, an unfortunate leather bracelet, and a turquoise ring extending all the way to the second knuckle. “He was warm, masculine, and classic American,” says Carrie. “Just like his furniture.”
But what of that furniture? Aidan is indeed a designer – and not just a designer, but a successful designer. On SATC, Aidan has a crowded retail space in Manhattan, press, a country house (it’s awful, but it’s still a country house), and the funds to buy an apartment for a fiancée with feet so cold they could cure a season six Samantha of her hot flashes. On AJLT, it’s revealed that he sold his company to West Elm. So – is his stuff actually any good?
Aidan’s furniture isn’t given the same amount of airtime as Charlotte’s gallery shows. (My favourite of her artists was the stringy-haired old man who painted her vulva while his wife served lemonade and cookies.) But there are episodes that give viewers a peek at Aidan’s vision, beyond his much-maligned personal style. There’s his introduction in the episode “No Ifs, Ands Or Butts”, where you can spy works from his oeuvre while Carrie gets dominated by his frisky dog; the overstuffed leather club chair that Carrie purchases from him under false pretences; some wooden items at a design fair, which Mr Big stains with a sweaty tumbler full of brown liquor. There’s the bar, Scout, that Aidan opens in season four with fellow SATC ex Steve Brady, and a half-finished chair he constructs as a wedding gift for Charlotte and Trey MacDougal (who, considering his severe impotence, may well have been triggered by all that wood).
The airy store features a few pieces that are a bit brutalist, with a touch of ’70s Scandi – or as Whitney Mallett, co-editor of the sold-out Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey, put it, the tables and chairs “tried for Judd but ended up more Ikea”. The other designs shown are sturdy, “clunky”, and “almost oppressive” as the Idiot Stick Figure with No Soul (aka Mr Big’s 20-something wife Natasha) derides them, and they’re a little boring. My friend Henry Hickman, a furniture designer in Los Angeles, says that Carrie’s chair reminds him of the ones they use at the Albuquerque airport. It does seem cosy, though. Perhaps there is a reason beyond the emotional that Carrie refuses to part with her $2,800 chair, even after she and Aidan go through their first agonising break-up.
“Aidan made furniture that was heavy, dark, undeniably masculine – before the mid-century modern revolution – before every couch and dresser had those angled legs flimsier than the writing on an AJLT episode,” says Steven Phillips-Horst, comedian and co-host of the brilliant and somewhat lifestyle-focused podcast Celebrity Book Club with Steven and Lily. “The infamous chair seems deep, comfortable honestly – something lacking in so much of today’s Wayfair supremacy.”
That chair – nearly big enough to qualify as a doomed loveseat – was so deep that Carrie and Aidan could curl up on it together to watch her gifted copy of Jocks and Cocks IV. But beyond that one piece, Aidan’s success seems to be a feat of branding. He is hot (did I mention he’s 6-foot-5) and can spin a great yarn. Who can forget his tales of stripping leather off of 100-year-old railroad seats?
“Some of Aidan’s furniture feels a little old-world and warm without being too spindly antique-y, which earns him some marks, but the overall impact is a little bland,” says Tyler Watamanuk, the writer behind the design newsletter Sitting Pretty. “Would a swarm of people have descended upon his shop after reading that Style section profile if he wasn’t himbo-adjacent? I think not. But this is New York, and sometimes being handsome and having a good head of hair is all it takes.”
“In Aidan’s defence, collectible design popped off a little later with fairs like Design Miami developing more of a market for out-there designs,” says Mallett, who also compared Aidan’s designs to Ethan Allen. “To be a salvage one-off design guy maybe he had to play it a little more safe. But still then or now being hot and telling a story is a big part of moving merchandise.”
Eventually, in season four, Aidan gets hotter (goodbye thumb rings) and opens a bar. Scout, with its smooth mahogany counters, looks to be his crowning achievement. “His bar with Steve feels like the strongest work in his oeuvre,” says Watamanuk. “The warm Americana of it feels a little ahead of its time for the turn of the millennium, like the influential Freemans in the Lower East Side that would come later – but without the regrettable taxidermy.”
As a furniture shop-cum-bar owner, Aidan positioned himself as the Green River Project blueprint, minus all the twigs. The Green River Project – owned by designers Benjamin Bloomstein and Aaron Aujla, who is married to Bode designer Emily Adams Bode – designs furniture and interiors, such as the Chinatown bar and restaurant Dr Clark. They make beautiful things and beautiful spaces (the Bode stores they design are little rustic jewel boxes). But Aidan did it first! Can he get a discount on a chore jacket?
“He walked,” says Mallett, “so Green River Project could run.”
“He has a rustic cabin, drives a vintage pick-up truck, and has a bird-hunting dog,” says Watamanuk. “Aidan might have been the original Bode Boy.”
Aidan made his Sex and the City debut on 9 July 2000. And despite what the youth of today might view as the “Y2K aesthetic”, a flip through Architectural Digest’s July 2000 issue reveals that Aidan was quite on trend for his time, fitting in with squishy, craftsman-type offerings.
Like Aidan himself, is it for me? No. I personally prefer Mr Big and his commitment issues and tiny beige furniture. But isn’t it nice to cuddle in a deep leather chair with someone you love, turquoise rings and all? There are several currently available for purchase from West Elm.