As I mentioned yesterday in my post about Blake Lively’s floral fashion parade on the press tour for both It Ends With Us and her haircare line Blake Brown, it was all leading up to last night’s premiere in New York City.
In the end, it ended with a style stunt. Blake went into the Versace archive and pulled a Britney Spears special.
She also made sure to tell PEOPLE on the red carpet that it is indeed Britney’s actual dress.
The dress has flowers on it, so it fits with the whole theme dressing thing she’s been doing with her character in the movie called “Lily Bloom” and of course we’ve been seeing this kind of fashion stunting more and more, with Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala and Kendall Jenner doing Winona Ryder the year later. So that’s the trend that Blake is following, in combination with the floral theme to go with the film which, of course, was made most famous and carried out to maximum effect by Zendaya and Law Roach.
So it’s work. The clothes and the presentation of them is part of the work. I say this because, since it’s part of the work, in my opinion it’s fair to assess it based on how the work is performed. If theme dressing is a work move, a skill, not unlike, for example, a gymnastics skill, since we’ve just come off a week of watching gymnastics, we can grade it on a curve.
Using that analogy, Simone Biles is Zendaya. Theme dressing for Zendaya is the Biles II, Simone’s vault previously known as the Yurchenko double pike which we’ve heard so much about the last few years but especially over the course of these Games. She’s the only one who can do it so consistently, and in competition. We can also say this of Zendaya and how she consistently delivers on the carpet when she’s promoting her movies, from Dune to Dune Part 2 to Challengers.
Blake is attempting the Zendaya. I appreciate the effort but the execution scores aren’t there.
Setting the analogy aside though, and taking the entire promotional wardrobe into consideration and all these flowers, like I said yesterday, it’s all kind of blurring together. That’s what can happen, I think, with a floral motif that’s just a floral motif. No one piece has been a standout, not even this Britney dress. This is why styling is a talent, where stylists can bring value. It’s not just about picking clothes with a floral print or a certain colour or that look like tennis wear. It’s about making each look distinct, while maintaining a through-thread. Or, in Law’s case, picking pieces that may not have a punch-you-in-the-face tennis vibe but can evoke the energy of it, or even just the lightest scent of it. Law and Zendaya have these instincts, and they are unmatched. Like Simone Biles.
Back to Blake, last night’s premiere and the Britney stunt was quickly followed by the Vogue cover. We anticipated this last week in my post about the Blake Brown launch because Vogue had an interview with her about the haircare line and it’s around the time of the release of the September issue so it was an easy prediction.
The shoot was directed by Baz Luhrmann, co-starring Hugh Jackman and the piece doesn’t reveal much about Blake but it does, for me at least, reveal a lot about the writer, Andrew Sean Greer, or at least about the motivation the writer was given for this piece. Because the thesis is not subtle. What Vogue and Andrew are screaming in this cover feature is that BLAKE LIVELY IS A MOVIE STAR. At one point Hugh Jackman even compares her to Nicole Kidman.
But you know what I would be annoyed about if I were Blake and the magazine was trying this hard to make the case that she’s a MOVIE STAR in all caps? It’s how she’s introduced in the second paragraph, and I’ve taken a screenshot and highlighted it below:
If your thesis is about how she is a MOVIE STAR, why is her first descriptor “the wife of Ryan Reynolds”?
This is maddening!
Anyway, where celebrity profiles are concerned, this one doesn’t have much to say that we didn’t already know. They’re working real hard to sell Blake as a MOVIE STAR and, at the same time, the BEST MOM in the world, in the most coffee mug way possible. And then, what I found to be the most interesting part, is when the conversation takes a turn from baking to writing.
Blake is asked if she writes. She then tells a story about when Ryan Reynolds mentioned her writing in an interview:
“My husband did an interview where they asked, ‘What’s something surprising that people don’t know about your wife?’ And he said: ‘It’s that she’s a writer. She writes on every movie she works on.’ And the interviewer said: ‘And the baking? And the baking, right? She’s a great baker.’ It was just such an interesting moment. I don’t know if it’s a female thing or not. They want to talk about the baking.”
She’s not wrong, and I don’t blame her for bristling over that situation. At the same time, there’s also nothing in this profile that surprises me about her that I don’t know, except for the writing. And what she says about writing and where her interest is, after it’s mentioned that Paul Feig, who directs Blake in both A Simple Favour movies, said that she punches up her dialogue after reading the script:
“A blank page is not nearly as exciting to me as starting with a script and finding something people have overlooked. Saying no, no, no, there’s something there! To me, it’s a treasure hunt. And so when I can see the treasure, then I get to be an archaeologist. I get to excavate, I get to carve it out and find this thing and show people the value in it. That, to me, is what I love.”
I like the way she describes her process, I want to know more about that. And it is a skill, for an actor to be able to bring their understanding of their character and add to the story and the dialogue with how they know the character to behave and react and say what they need to say, or not say what they don’t want to say. Here is the Blake that we don’t get enough insight about. But you know what happens next, after that paragraph? We’re told that she’s about to make an oatmeal cappuccino.
Which, I’m not saying she can’t be both good at dialogue and a barista. But just that it seems in this piece and so much of the other information we get about Blake or from Blake, one thing is weighted more than the other. And if she herself says she might be frustrated by it, then who is it on to start to weigh it differently? Her? The media? The audience?
