Carrie Bradshaw famously knows good sex* (and isn't afraid to ask). She also knows good fashion (yes, okay, she wore one bandana too many in series five but she is still the best-dressed woman ever to have graced the small screen). So when it comes to dressing for bed, she is a total pro. Negligees, pyjamas, push-up bras and impromptu outfits comprising boyfriends' clothes – girlfriend can put an after-hours look together.       

Carrie's bras in bed.
Sarah Jessica Parker had a no-nudity clause written into her contract so that meant, despite all the sex she had over the course of six years of Sex and the City, we never ever saw Carrie's nipples. What we saw instead were a whole lot of bras in bed. Yes, Carrie, the woman who boldly snookered a cuckolded Nat-aaaahsha at lunch while wearing a skintight newspaper-print Dior dress sans bra, came over all modest in the bedroom and would always wear a bra while having sex and, even, while sleeping. A generation of teenagers who learned about sex via SATC grew up thinking that it was the done thing to wear underwired lingerie in bed.  

While lying awake pensively, Carrie wore a bra. Why did nobody tell her that wearing a Wonderbra to bed was probably one of the root causes of her restless sleeping? 

When she went to Suffern with Aidan, she spent most of the time cavorting in gingham hot pants and teeny vests but at night, she put on a sensible bra.  

OK so Hannah Horvath she is not but you've got to hand it to her – this is a solid bedtime look. 

Season 3

She also did some of her famous pondering in a bra. 

And sometimes she wore a bra while working. 

She wore this lurid bra because she had had lacklustre first sex with Berger and thought that pink lingerie would improve things. And to think she was held up as a 'sexpert'...

The negligees of Carrie Bradshaw.
Carrie did not have a full-time job and consequently spent an awful lot of time lounging or pondering or calling her friends or ex-boyfriends on the phone. And you don't have to get dressed for that. You can do it in a nightie. Which she did. Often. 

Working a take-a call-have-a-fag nightie look.

There's the catching-up-on-your-magazine-reading nightie look.

And the reading-the-morning-paper nightie look.

And even when Carrie wore a nightie, she usually wore a bra. Now, why would you do that?

The very normal nightwear of Carrie Bradshaw. 
Occasionally, Carrie would wear something that a normal person would wear, you know, she would eschew giant corsages or five-inch heels, and wear a pair of trainers or a cardigan or, on very rare occasions, a pair of pyjamas.    

Here she is wearing a nana-style nightdress. 

Lying awake, worrying, wondering, hyothesising, obsessing in a pair of PJS.  

On the phone in the type of sheep-themed pyjamas you might buy for your nephew. 

When Carrie stole her boyfriend's clothes. 
A staple motif of the rom-com, wearing a boyfriend's shirt signifies intimacy, ownership, comfort as well as carrying post-coital connotations obviously. Carrie styled out the look like the pro that she is.    

A true vision of intimacy. (Never mind that Aidan did not seem to own these types of stiff shirts.)

Aidan was so big and strong (he made furniture, for crying out loud) and Carrie was so teensy and bird-like. That's what this shirt is saying. 

Before Carrie blew it with that random guy Ben, whose apartment she ransacked an episode entitled The Freak Show, she lazed in his bed wearing his shirt.  

Carrie was resolutely single at this point so God only knows where she picked up this big white shirt but she made it look good on a Los Angeles balcony.  

The ultimate borrowed-from-a-boyfriend look, this white shirt, belt and heels ensemble was created out of necessity after Carrie fell into the pond at Central Park with Big and was forced to pop on one of his shirts, her perfect Richard Tyler dress now in a plastic bag.

There's borrowing shirts from boyfriends and then there's borrowing pants from boyfriends and the latter suggests a whole new level of comfortable intimacy. This shot of Carrie and Aidan companionably brushing their teeth while wearing matching boxer shorts will, for the Aidan-loving faction, always act as a reminder that Carrie should never have chosen Big.

Still though, intimate as it is, she is wearing a bra. Because Carrie Bradshaw wouldn't be Carrie Bradshaw without a bra.