When Fashion School & Gossip Girl Collide

How convenient that two main occupations of mine of late—digital sketching and Gossip Girl—would convene in such a, well, material fashion. (Ha! Fashion! I am hilarious.)

Interruption: the most ridiculous Sandals Jamaica ad is on TV right now. Sandals, like Michael Scott on The Office took Jan to. So this ad actually has “Time of My Life” as the background song. Who on EARTH is this targeting? Amazing.

Anyway, first, I’ll explain that a key part of fashion design is digital illustration and graphic design. You may think it’s all Project-Runway-style freakouts (speaking of which, how excited am I that P.R. is finally back? SO VERY.) and madly inspired moments but actually, design now involves a lot of painstaking work in various programs written by Adobe. For my Applied Technology class, I have to draw dresses, shoes, what have you, and then lay out pages with backgrounds and color swatches and titles and stuff…all of which has to correspond with the concept of the design. I like designing everything, but jesus it takes forever. Here’s what a finished page looks like, using a photo inspiration and then adapting it:


Second, I’ve started watching the new show Gossip Girl recently. Along with being the next O.C. (in a good way—oh, the adolescent drama! The love triangles and pentagons! The endless catty comments that we wish we’d thought of in high school!), Gossip Girl also takes The O.C.’s place as fantastic fashion spectacle. There’s Blair, preptastic princess extraordinaire, who manages to pull off headbands and ringlets, and then our heroine, Serena, who’s kind of designer bohemian and has hair that is always unbrushed yet totally perfect somehow. I’m sure her wardrobe is calculated by teams of statisticians to make us fall uncontrollably in girl-love with her, and I can’t deny it’s worked. In fact, I KNOW that the wardrobe is at least as calculated as most…because Gossip Girl, after making you covet every $400 Tory Burch striped sequin shift that Serena wears to an ill-fated party, gives you a hyperlink to its ONLINE STORE. Yep, Gossip Girl has its own boutique with links to all the stuff to let you buy our way to Upper-East-Side soap-opera stardom yourself. You can even "browse by brand, character, episode or product"! And THEN you can link to Victoria's Secret looks "inspired by" the characters.

So while I could rattle on about how interesting it is to see how the entertainment and retail industries are coming together via the all-powerful internet, instead I’ll cut to the coincidence: when I visited the Gossip Girl style file deal online (in the name of research, natch), what did I see but the very purse I’d just finished using for my class! I picked it solely because it was easy to draw, but I guess it must be chic, too. At least according to The CW’s statisticians.

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