TEN years of watching “Sex and the City,” including the sanitized reruns on TBS, has trained a generation of label- and love-addled romantics not to raise an eyebrow, presuming Botox hasn’t yet made that impossible, when Carrie Bradshaw dons a black Burberry coat and a trilby to go shopping, film noir style, at Duane Reade. Or when Carrie wears a four-figure Nina Ricci sweater trimmed with hundreds of feathers while typing on a laptop in the privacy of her own home. Or when Carrie crawls into Big’s big bed, wearing makeup and a single strand of pearls.

With fashion, as with sex, fantasy is far more aesthetically pleasurable than the reality of, say, Alex McCord in “The Real Housewives of New York City.” As far as fantasies go, “Sex and the City,” as a series on HBO, was to fashion what “Hotel Erotica,” on Cinemax, was to sex: unbelievably plastic porn, without all the messy bits or the credit card bills.

In the film version of “Sex and the City,” which opened on Friday, the fashion is jaw-droppingly fantastic, Herbal Essences good. In two recent screenings in New York, the audience reacted most vocally  there literally was moaning  when Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, discovers that Mr. Big, her noncommittal boyfriend, played by Chris Noth, has built her a walk-in closet with carpeting and flattering lighting. She hangs a single pair of $525 Manolo Blahnik shoes there as a dog would mark its territory. (Oddly, this was not Mr. Blahnik’s best effort, unless he was inspired by a foot fetish that involves blue leprechauns.)

Image WARDROBE! Birds of a feather go to fashion shows together in the film, showing a more polished look than they did in the HBO series. Credit... Craig Blankenhorn/New Line Cinema

In the television series, broadcast from 1998 to 2004, fashion  the industry, the designers, the clothes  was a regular character, cleverly manipulated by the stylist Patricia Field to refine the personalities of Carrie (whimsical, eclectic), Miranda (independent, biting), Samantha (racy, sensational) and Charlotte (preppy, endearing).