Manhattan is weathering stormy economic times. Yet on Gossip Girl, the pretty young things are partying like it's...well, not 2009. Alessandra Stanley talks to Blake Lively about America's favorite fiction.
Photographed by Mario Testino.
The scene called for Serena van der Woodsen to saunter down East Sixty-first Street with sunny insouciance, but Blake Lively, who plays the heroine of Gossip Girl, was instead stooped and pale-green with stomach flu.
Shivering in the dank November rain, Lively stood as a makeup woman spritzed her cascade of blonde hair. Her teeth chattered as she wanly assured a concerned member of the film crew, "It's OK; I just need to go to the doctor." Then a production assistant plucked the oversize down coat from her shoulders, and in a black Marc Jacobs overcoat and Té Casan teal suede boots, Lively sauntered while delivering a stream of sisterly advice to Serena's younger brother, Eric, without a stumble or hitch. In the cinematographer's misty, romanticized frame, Serena was as rosily aglow as ever, and so were the town houses in the background. The lens cropped the Upper East Side down to its most stately and prosperous lines, with no trace of the glaring RETAIL SPACE AVAILABLE signs and GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE posters one block away, signals that the worldwide recession is lapping at the edges of Manhattan's most privileged ZIP codes.
Now in its second season, Gossip Girl has the ability to make New York City, whatever the meteorological or economic climate, appear, like Serena, dazzling and worldly and optimistic—if, indeed, a bit preposterous. This is, after all, a series that presents high school swathed in all the perks of adulthood (sex, cash, alcohol) and adulthood stripped of financial cares or parental responsibilities ("Vanya the doorman used to sign our permission slips from school," Eric reminds his mother, Lily, when Lily tries to argue she wasn't really so neglectful). And it's a show that works for adolescents and parents alike, which is hardly surprising—generation gaps are becoming increasingly obsolete in a society where, on-screen and off-, youngsters grow up too fast and parents refuse to act or look their age. It's a nighttime cocktail of a soap, served up dry, with a strong dash of satire. Smart-aleck cultural allusions to everyone from Tory Burch, Giorgio Armani, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Rainer Maria Rilke to Eliot Spitzer (Serena's mother instructs her wedding planner to seat the disgraced former governor "as far away from Serena's table as possible") are aimed at viewers whose cultural map was shaped by watching The Simpsons and South Park. On the other hand, the over-the-top catfights and histrionic lovers' quarrels are gratifyingly familiar to viewers who grew up on Dynasty and Falcon Crest and even All My Children. The two strains mix mostly because of the setting in moneyed, upper-class New York—one of the few places where snobbish sophistication and childish fantasy easily intersect.
For this reason, the show's creators and stars see no point in changing the ethos of Gossip Girl to better reflect newer economic realities. "We live in an alternate universe on the show; it's a heightened reality, so I don't think the writers would work that in," Lively said of the recession, curled on a couch in a Gramercy Park apartment during a break in shooting while cuddling Penny, her copper-colored Maltepoo. Penny wore a tangerine-colored cashmere sweater, one of three given to her by David Lauren. "They created a show that people can watch after a long day and not have to stress and worry and feel the burdens of real life," Lively said. "It's just an escape, watching these sparkly lives and just escaping into this other world for an hour."
These sparkly lives are rattled more by sexual tension than by class crises. In the world of Gossip Girl, there are few signs of economic hardship. Mostly, it's a contest between the haves and have-mores: For example, the Humphrey clan—members include Serena's on-and-off boyfriend Dan (Penn Badgley), his sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen), and their hipster dad, Rufus (Matthew Settle)—lives in the artsy, waterfront area of Brooklyn that's one part Williamsburg, one part DUMBO, and must find their way among families who divide their time among Park Avenue, the Hamptons, and Tuscany. After Lily's latest husband, Bart, dies, the family learns that he "has more towers than Trump, more bucks than Bloomberg." Thus far, the only character to suffer a serious reversal of fortune is Nate, played by Chace Crawford, who is forced to move in with the Humphreys when his father—a swindler and coke fiend—flees the country. In this New York, nothing as commonplace as bear markets can bring about financial ruin: It requires a dastardly character flaw.
Gossip Girl was adapted from the best-selling young-adult fiction series by Cecily von Ziegesar, who was working as an editor at a book-packaging company when the idea floated up to create a more-contemporary line of fiction about private school kids in New York. Von Ziegesar, who had attended the Upper East Side girls' academy Nightingale-Bamford and knew well the milieu, volunteered to take on the proposal. She invented the Constance Billard School for Girls, where Serena and her BFF and sometime-rival Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) hold court.
"The characters came right away," von Ziegesar says over lunch at Fred's in Barneys, a crowded watering hole for the blonde, slim, and soignée, and where von Ziegesar, who is blonde, slim, and soignée, fits right in. "It flooded out of me; I always wanted to write, but I never thought I'd be writing for teenagers."
Or for some of the most discerning arbiters of culture: Janet Malcolm, in an essay in The New Yorker, likened the Gossip Girl characters to those found in Nabokov, Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, and Tolstoy (Nate, according to Malcolm, is a "Vronsky-manqué"). Malcolm argued that the television adaptation doesn't hold a candle to the "sly truthfulness" of von Ziegesar's literary oeuvre, but von Ziegesar herself doesn't mind the adaptation. "I still like it," she says. "I watch it every week."
The show has taken many departures from the novels, especially in the second season, which has abandoned any lingering pretense of term papers or gym class in favor of a Dangerous Liaisons romance between Blair and the sulfurous Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), as well as what to wear for such an assignation.
"The fashion is just unbelievable. You can watch our show on mute and be entertained," Lively says. And she's not overstating it. The characters wear designer clothes that teeter between unattainable chic and self-parody, be it Bass's wearing a tuxedo covered with paillettes that shimmer like a matador's suit or Blair's attending the dean's party at Yale with an Alice-in-Plunderland pewter-colored satin bow in her hair. For her part, Lively is entranced by Serena's authentically local look. "Just being here, walking around, you pick it up really quickly," she explains. "In New York, you put on skinny jeans and riding boots and a leather coat and handbag, and you take on that posture and character," Lively says. "It becomes very natural." Lively's natural style? Costume National boots, dark Rag & Bone trousers, and a Joie cashmere vest over a Ports 1961 white pointelle cashmere sweater, punctuated by Chanel earrings, a Chanel handbag, and a Jeri Cohen diamond bracelet. ("They let me borrow it, and now I can't take it off," Lively says mischievously.)
The Joie vest is a second-season development. Lively said that one day she showed up for work wearing hers, and discovered that the wardrobe crew had picked the exact same one for Serena. This tickled the star. "The more they work with me and see my style, and the more I learn about fashion, the more input I have," she explains. "It's more collaborative now than it was in the beginning because then I had no idea what I was doing."
Lively often jokingly refers to her California fashion pedigree as "sweatpants and UGGs," but actually, she has always had an interest in clothes, inspired by her mother, a former model from Georgia, who sews and used to take Lively as a child to boutiques and vintage stores and tailor adult clothes to fit her. "She just did that because she was so creative and because she didn't want me to be dressed in big T-shirts cinched with a plastic clip like all the rest of the kids." Ironically, it was fashion that gave Lively a taste of how cruel girls can be. When she entered a private school in Los Angeles in second grade, for the first and only time in her life she did not fit in. "It was the only school where people were just downright mean to me," she recalls. "They would make fun of my clothes because I dressed differently than the other kids."
That would seem to be perfect background research for a young actress who would soon star in what might be her generation's defining snarky teen drama. But von Ziegesar sees her characters differently. "The whole premise of Gossip Girl is to get inside the heads of the girls who are considered mean girls and show that they're real and have flaws, and that they're not so mean, they are not so scary." Nothing is scary in Serena's world: not the bad boys, backstabbing friends, bombshell revelations, or indeed the bear market. The sex is sarcastic, the sarcasm sexy, and, most of all, it's ultimately as serenely confident as Serena in the rain; and maybe that's why everyone is watching.
"East Side Story" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the February 2009 issue of Vogue.
i reall like her vogue cover! and for her haters and those who didn't want to see her on the cover: this is the best vogue cover in like a year?!!!!! so u go Blake! yay!
