New Sex And The City?

It has been described as "Bridget Jones goes to Harvey Nichols". And if the extraordinary hype is to be believed, it's also a novel which will take pride of place on every beach mat this summer.

Written by a British journalist living in New York, Bergdorf Blondes is a waspish, bitchy and unapologetic exposé of the vanities shared by an elite coterie of young women whose lives revolve around Manhattan's most exclusive department store, Bergdorf Goodman's.

In America, it is already something of a publishing sensation. Its author is Plum Sykes, an English-born fashion writer at American Vogue, where she works for yet another A-list Brit in Manhattan, Anna Wintour.

Sykes, 35 and single, whose own father Mark once scandalised polite London society in the Sixties, received one of the largest advances for a first book (a whacking £400,000) from her publishers after she had written only six chapters.

If the novel has a plot (and, in truth, it is pretty thin), it revolves around a young, egocentric British magazine journalist, appropriately named Moi (few guesses whom Plum has based her on, then) who trawls the social circuit in New York with her best friend, an heiress called Julie Bergdorf.

The pair are ambitious and relentlessly shallow as they endeavour to snare a partner (in Bergdorf Blonde parlance, a PH, or Potential Husband). Hollywood stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Charlize Theron are already being spoken of as front-runners to star in a film version.

But the novel's real success, which Sykes's publisher hopes will be mirrored in Britain, has less to do with the dubious plot or leaden writing style. Rather, it is based on Sykes's clever wheeze of parodying this social elite - a very posh and American Footballers' Wives, but just as vacuous - who are the mainstay of New York gossip columns.

According to Sykes, the Bergdorf Blondes - or BBs - are in their twenties and early thirties, have million-dollar trust funds in the way that we have credit cards, speak their own language, and carry their vanities and neuroses in the latest Chanel handbag.

Love them or loathe them (and it's a pretty close thing), the BBs are the latest social tribe from the city which brought us the Yuppies in the Eighties and Sex and The City in the Nineties.

Below, and exclusive to the Evening Standard, is a guide to a social milieu breathlessly described by one awestruck reviewer as "the people all Manhattan is talking about". Even the BBC, through its New York office, is said to have put in a bid for rights to a TV series mirroring Sex and The City's success. You have been warned.