The cover girl for the February issue of Vogue is Gossip Girl‘s Blake lively, and Style.com has given us a sneak preview of the article and accompanying photographs. (You can also click here to see a brief Vogue video clip of the interview and photo shoot with Lively.) Along with its copious and varied cultural references, the show is also best known for being a veritable fashion parade. Lively told Vogue, “The fashion is just unbelievable. You can watch our show on mute and be entertained.” And she says that she didn’t find it difficult to adapt the look of her character, Serena Van Der Woodsen. “Just being here, walking around, you pick it up really quickly. 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. It becomes very natural.”
Lively says that in the second season of the show, she’s come to play a bigger role in the development of the style for her character, Serena Van Der Woodsen:
The more they work with me and see my style, and the more I learn about fashion, the more input I have… It’s more collaborative now than it was in the beginning because then I had no idea what I was doing.In Style.com’s excerpt from the interview, Lively also talks at length about how the show has influenced her own sense of fashion. She jokes that her pre-Gossip Girl idea of style was the California signature starlet-suit, “sweat pants and UGGs.”
She also reveals that her mother turned her on to fashion possibilities from an early age. Her mom, a former model, would tailor adult clothes for young Lively purchased from vintage stores.
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.Not fitting in, of course, cost her popularity points when she entered private school in Los Angeles. Livelys aid, “They would make fun of my clothes because I dressed differently than the other kids.”
One can only hope that those “other kids” now watch Gossip Girl. And maybe playing Serena is Lively’s own version of Tina Fey’s “suck it” speech at the Golden Globes.
