Blake Lively's Inescapable Floral Phase
Her red-carpet tour promoting her movie "It Ends With Us" has been earning mixed reviews.
Red-carpet dressing these days feels like the passing of the Olympics torch — one famous woman seizes it to promote something and dominates the Daily Mail sidebar with her clothes, then it passes to someone else, then someone else, and so on. Recently, we’ve had Beyoncé promoting Cowboy Carter in Western looks; Zendaya promoting Challengers in tennis looks; and Daisy Edgar Jones promoting Twisters in tornado (?) looks. Now, Blake Lively takes a turn, using floral looks to promote a potpourri of endeavors, including her upcoming movie It Ends With Us, her new haircare line, and her husband Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool and Wolverine.
In It Ends With Us, based on the massively popular Colleen Hoover book, Lively plays a woman named Lily Bloom who owns a flower shop called Lily’s Blooms. Lively announced on Instagram on July 11, “A month of flower fashion has begun.”
(With all due respect, she’s also doing it to launch Blake Brown, her haircare line including $19 shampoos and detanglers. A lot of people aren’t buying that these products were needed because she couldn’t find them anywhere else, but I also get that being a star is a never-ending hustle and having a product line is as core to fame these days as having an Instagram account.)
People has called Lively “the queen of method dressing,” noting that “she was doing it as early as 2018, when she committed to tailored suits while doing promo for A Simple Favor.” In that (incredible) movie, she played an intimidating-yet-alluring fashion PR executive living in a modern house with her hot husband in a leafy New York City suburb who wore outré pantsuits and wide-brimmed hats that harkened to the strangeness of Lively’s actual red-carpet style.
While she may have come earlier to it than her peers, you can’t give her wholesale credit for the idea of theme-dressing, which has a long history in fashion — on runways, at the Met Gala, and beyond. That said, we are seeing a lot more theme-dressing lately. It’s even spilled into the public domain in a big way, as evidenced by fans dressing like Beyoncé to see her Renaissance tour, in pink to see the Barbie movie, and like Taylor Swift to see the Eras concert.
Zendaya has perfected the red-carpet promotional tour in collaboration with her stylist/image architect Law Roach, wearing tennis-themed clothes for her Challengers press events, and before that, sci-fi-themed stuff to promote Dune: Part Two. Zendaya seems to overtake social media anytime she wears anything, and I would imagine her work with Roach has created a playbook that movie studios would love to replicate for any number of female-led films. This may be why there’s something adorable about fans going out of their way to DIY outfits that resemble their favorite stars, but theme-dressing feels different when highly polished and churned out by celebrities. While stars like Zendaya execute it well, for others, it feels like they’re wearing called-in outfits chosen in part to please a studio executive on high.
Before Lively, Daisy Edgar-Jones was dominating red-carpet coverage for her Twisters looks. While less obviously themed than Lively’s floral items, she wore a lot of earth tones, which made sense because… tornadoes, too, are earth-toned?
Edgar-Jones’s looks got a lot of attention, so you could say she aced the assignment with the help of her stylist Dani Michelle. Lively famously “doesn’t use a stylist,” as article after article tells us. But she’s presumably acquiring outfits in much the same way: someone (an assistant?) is calling fashion houses and borrowing them for her. This process typically entails an agreement that the star wear complete looks by a brand, instead of mixing and matching. She’s not going into a store and buying stuff and finding, say, Miu Miu pumps to wear with a Gucci dress and an Oscar de la Renta jacket. Shopping like a plebeian might not be the best way to get attention for a red-carpet marketing blitz, to be fair. But it’s not like styling herself — which she perhaps brings up as a way to seem more relatable? — means she’s doing occasion dressing in the manner of an average person.
So far during her floral-themed month, Lively has worn several floral looks by Dauphinette; a pair of $19,000 Valentino floral jeans; a custom Versace catsuit for the Deadpool and Wolverine premiere; more floral denim jeans by Chanel with a matching top and bag; a pajama-esque floral look by Chanel; a full Versace resort look including yellow tights; and jeans with faux leather chaps and a coordinating chunky cardigan by Stella McCartney.
To the official It Ends With Us premiere on Tuesday night she wore perhaps her best look of the month, a 2002 embellished floral Versace gown that Britney Spears also memorably wore 22 years earlier.
While a lot of this red-carpet theme-dressing usually draws almost exclusively breathless praise, that hasn’t been true for Lively. Red Carpet Fashion Awards noted that her leather Dauphinette pieces were “puzzling” given the hot weather. Page Six ran a whole item about how commenters “poke[d] fun” at her Chanel pajama look. The Cut noted that “the internet has some thoughts” about these clothes, citing commenters who called her “wacky” and multiple people who said she needs a stylist.
Maybe this is what she genuinely likes to wear and thinks looks good. Maybe she chooses odd things on purpose knowing they’ll get the media’s attention and get us talking. Whatever it is, theme-dressing is a clever way to promote consumerism: don’t just buy the tickets — buy the outfits, the makeup, the bracelets, and the shampoo.
Loose Threads
Blake Lively is also on the September cover of Vogue. The confusing cover story was “directed” by Anna Wintour bestie Baz Luhrmann. Here’s how Vogue describes it in one caption: “Blake Lively stars as ‘The Cat’ in Baz Luhrmann’s Vogue fantasia, The Heist of the Heart.” The story discussed her kids more than her fashion sense and didn’t even mention her new hair line (perhaps the news was embargoed at the time of the interview because Lively recently got her Vogue moment for that). Lively implies that the reason she did the photo shoot was because Baz directed it: “[W]hen they said Baz will do it, I thought, Okay, I’ve always wanted to work with Baz. Even if it’s just a week doing a photo shoot for Vogue, that’s still working with him.”
Cate Blanchett made a red-carpet appearance to promote Borderlands wearing a top made of 102 old spoons, by Hodakova. I don’t know if this is theme-dressing necessarily, but one fan commented, per Page Six, “She wore spoons because she ATE.”
Tommy Hilfiger’s upcoming New York Fashion Week show will be held on a decommissioned Staten Island ferry.
Hermès designer Nadège Vanhée talked to T about her inspirations: “I love looking at trees — not that I’m a yoga mama. I just think they’re very resilient. They find their way to the light and have a strong compulsion to be alive.”
Troye Sivan has a fragrance brand called Tsu Lange Yor. Business of Fashion talked to him about it, and reports: “The signature scent, TLY 5755 is reminiscent of “warm wooden furnishings,” Sivan said…”
Every time a new film is on the horizon, I dread the Method Press Tour looks. It’s just so predictable!
When Vogue picks their girls they really pick them for life. I get it, she has an adaptation of a hit book coming out and Anna loves her but the high concept cover and the article trying to convince us she’s the last movie star is a bit much for someone with her resume.