Although it's common folk wisdom that pop culture use of names can drive name fashions, when I start looking at the detailed statistics and trends, I've become less confident about this. Certainly hearing a name regularly -- even if only on a subconscious level -- makes people more comfortable about using it, but lets look at some of the specific examples you mention. In Sex and the City, the character of Aidan first appears in 2000 (and for that matter, in July of 2000) whereas the change-point for the name Aidan definitely starts in 1999. So it would make more sense to conclude that the tv character was named due to the baby-name fashion.
The timing for Jaden Smith synchronizes better, but when you look at where Jaden is taking off in 1999 and 2000 it's in the midwest and the Rocky Mountain states, which aren't what you normally associate with Hollywood-driven fashions.
Hayden Christensen's Star Wars debut was in 2002, three years after the "change point" for the name (and a year after an additional spelling variant made the top 1000, which is another symptom of explosive popularity). He seems to have been irrelevant to the development of the trend -- rather, I think he's an example of specific celebrities becoming remembered as salient examples of a name because of the trend, even when they don't seem to affect it.
Peyton/Payton is really odd in this context: it's the only name in the larger group where boys and girls track nearly identically. It had been rising steadily throughout the '90s but didn't participate in the post-1998 massive increase and, in fact, declined slightly (for all spellings and both genders) after 2000 for several years. The last two years (i.e., 2008 & 2009) have seen a massive increase among girls while boys have dropped. Viewed on a granular level, the popularity of Peyton/Payton has tracked almost inversely to Peyton Manning's career. (Common wisdom has it that the popularity of Peyton/Payton was driven by the movie and later prime-time soap opera Peyton Place, but that doesn't match the chronology at all either.)
I started out thinking that celebrity examples were a major force in name popularity (and it's certainly a popular motif in baby-name books!) but I've become much more skeptical the more research I do.
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The timing for Jaden Smith synchronizes better, but when you look at where Jaden is taking off in 1999 and 2000 it's in the midwest and the Rocky Mountain states, which aren't what you normally associate with Hollywood-driven fashions.
Hayden Christensen's Star Wars debut was in 2002, three years after the "change point" for the name (and a year after an additional spelling variant made the top 1000, which is another symptom of explosive popularity). He seems to have been irrelevant to the development of the trend -- rather, I think he's an example of specific celebrities becoming remembered as salient examples of a name because of the trend, even when they don't seem to affect it.
Peyton/Payton is really odd in this context: it's the only name in the larger group where boys and girls track nearly identically. It had been rising steadily throughout the '90s but didn't participate in the post-1998 massive increase and, in fact, declined slightly (for all spellings and both genders) after 2000 for several years. The last two years (i.e., 2008 & 2009) have seen a massive increase among girls while boys have dropped. Viewed on a granular level, the popularity of Peyton/Payton has tracked almost inversely to Peyton Manning's career. (Common wisdom has it that the popularity of Peyton/Payton was driven by the movie and later prime-time soap opera Peyton Place, but that doesn't match the chronology at all either.)
I started out thinking that celebrity examples were a major force in name popularity (and it's certainly a popular motif in baby-name books!) but I've become much more skeptical the more research I do.