Photo: Dina Litovsky

Revisit this story from May 2025.

One afternoon this spring, I went to the West Village to meet a West Village Girl.

When I arrived at the whitewashed wine bar she chose, just two blocks from the brownstone stoop Carrie Bradshaw made famous, Miranda McKeon was journaling in her notebook and sipping a cup of green tea. She wore crimson leggings, a stack of candy-colored beaded necklaces, and a black sweatshirt that read SELF-EMPLOYED because she is a full-time influencer — or “creator,” as it is more polite to say in this part of town.

Online, the blonde, rosy-cheeked 23-year-old from New Jersey has over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. She posts a lot, most often about her charmed life in the West Village: sweating it out at Pilates, treating herself to weeknight Froyo, drinking espresso martinis with her girlfriends. Over a photo of herself walking down the street, she wrote this past fall, “Life is too short. Wear the sparkly skirt!!!! Post the content!!!!! Text the boy!!!!! Leave your number on the table!!!!! Ask that girl to get coffee!!!! Wear cowboy boots year round if you love them!!!! Try! Fail! Love! Lose! Try again! Be embarrassing! Take a risk! Feel it alllllll while you’re here!!!!!”

McKeon knew she wanted to rent in the West Village long before she moved to New York. In college at the University of Southern California, she started hearing from high-school friends, girls who had migrated here before her, that it was the place to live — a cobblestoned paradise where a young woman like herself could live an entire life within a block. During her final semester, last year, McKeon started obsessively combing StreetEasy for the perfect postgrad apartment and, to prepare for the move, watched Sex and the City for the first time. (She identifies as a Carrie with some of Miranda’s “girlboss energy”; she majored in entrepreneurship.) Now eight months in, she likes that the neighborhood reminds her of being back on campus insofar as she is constantly running into people she knows, though instead of classmates, they are girls she follows or who follow her. “I feel like a freshman in New York,” she said.

In person, McKeon seems, just as she does online, to be a remarkably well-adjusted and unjaded New Yorker. On weekends, she likes going out for what she calls a “three-drinker” (a nice dinner with her girlfriends with a self-imposed three-cocktail minimum). She knows the names of the important restaurants (the Corner Store, American Bar, Dante), a couple of age-appropriate bars (Bandits, Bayard’s, the Spaniard), and even some of her neighbors. “I went out to dinner with two girls last night, both of whom live on my street,” she told me. “We met through social media. It’s nice.”

Maybe her only complaint so far is her apartment. Online, it appears bright and roomy, decorated with string lights. Off-camera, she told me, there have been the occasional cockroaches, leaks, and — just this morning — a strange brown substance that dripped out of the brick wall onto her roommate’s comforter. She’s planning to resign the lease next year anyway. “Everything’s creaky. And … I love it!” McKeon said, slapping the table between us with both hands. “I could stay here forever.”

“There’s a cult mentality” to the neighborhood, McKeon continued. It’s true that many of the young women passing by the bar looked like her clones. They move through the neighborhood in packs, wearing the local uniform: a white tank, light-wash jeans, and Sambas, an iced matcha latte in hand, and hair slicked back into a tight ponytail. It was chilly, so several of them, McKeon cheekily pointed out through the window, were also wearing Aritzia Super Puffs, as she was, in the color matte pearl. “I feel like everyone else here in some way,” McKeon told me. “That’s the point of it, I guess.”

The neighborhood has, in recent years, transformed into a fabulous theme park for young women of some privilege to live out their Sex and the City fantasies, posting and spending their mid-20s away. They all seem to keep impressive workout routines (“Hot this and hot that,” McKeon said), have no shortage of girlfriends, and juggle busy heterosexual dating schedules. (The boys they consort with tend to be of the fratty variety.) They work in finance, marketing, publicity, tech — often with active social-media accounts on the side. They have seemingly endless disposable income. They are, by all conventional standards, beautiful. Occasionally, they are brunettes. Whatever their political beliefs, their lives seem fairly apolitical; as one 27-year-old lawyer on a walk with her best friend, both wearing identical puffer jackets, succinctly put their collective interests to me one day in April, “Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.” (They may be more political than they appear: “You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights,” said one person who lives in the neighborhood.)

This isn’t the first time a generation of socially ambitious young women has descended on the West Village and, as one fashion executive explained to me with just a hint of an eye roll, “made the neighborhood their whole personality,” fundamentally changing it along the way. If Sex and the City washed out the last of the neighborhood’s bohemians two decades ago and turned the West Village into a celebrity playground where real adults with real incomes live, the pandemic turned it into something else entirely: a bustling sorority house. “Everyone has the same mind-set. We’re here, we’re young, we’re single. Let’s go out and have fun and be ourselves. Work hard. Play hard,” said a new arrival from Texas with blonde highlights while polishing off a bottle of rosé with her girlfriends one afternoon. They’re basic, they told me proudly. “Basic isn’t a bad thing,” a crew of Cosmo drinkers at Anton’s, just down the street, elaborated. “There’s a reason everyone wants to be like that.” (There’s a sense lately that the entire city, or at least much of downtown Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn, is going the way of the West Village. “They’re everywhere,” almost everyone I talked to for this story told me.)

A so-called real New Yorker might survey a neighborhood overtaken by this homogenized mass and scoff at what was once a haven for artists and gays, admiringly described to me by multiple people as like Charleston, Georgetown, or “Southie” in Boston. But to the actual people living in those places, these young women, who broadcast their lives like reality television to their millions of followers, may just be the ultimate New Yorkers. They seem to be enjoying their city more than the rest of us do. “Finding a new restaurant to have an Aperol spritz and hang out? That’s a new level of enlightenment,” said Kit Keenan, an influencer and former Bachelor contestant who helped put this new version of the neighborhood on the map. I couldn’t help but wonder, Are the West Village Girls doing something right?