I Was Excited For The "Gossip Girl" Reboot Until I Saw The Pictures
When I first heard there was going to be a Gossip Girl reboot I was beyond excited. But the photos that were just released of the new filming were a huge letdown. Here’s why.
Gossip Girl is one of my favorite shows. I don’t typically like dramas because after a while the constant drama just gets old, but Gossip Girl is one where the plotline always keeps me interested. My friends and I love to talk about the show, specifically our love for Blair Waldorf. (How could you not like Queen B, right?) We even dressed up as Blair this year for Halloween.
Everything We Know about the Remake
So you can imagine our excitement when we heard that HBO Max would be doing a reboot of the show. The premise is basically this – eight years have passed since the original Gossip Girl website “went dark” and the new Constance Billard students are grappling with their own experience with a Gossip Girl-like “surveillance”. It centers on the idea that everyone has become a kind of Gossip Girl, if you will, following the advent of social media. Super relevant, right?
As for the cast, Kristen Bell returns as the voice of Gossip Girl. (Yay! You know you love her, xoxo.) Whitney Peak, Audrey Lind, and Eli Brown are members of the main trio with Jonathan Fernadez and Jason Gotay as core members of the ensemble cast. If you’ve never seen the original show, the setup is pretty close to the original.
What Happened to the Fashion?
It isn’t so much the basic premise of the show as it was the outfits the cast members were seen filming in that was disappointing.
I almost feel like the difference between the clothing in these two photos speaks for itself. Where’s all the color? The tights? The unique coats? Since when did the characters of Gossip Girl wear sneakers for crying out loud?
When the photos first came out I texted my friend group and asked what they all thought. The first response was, “ONE OF THEM IS WEARING A HOODIE”. Yes, the all caps were necessary. Chuck Bass, one of the show’s heartthrobs, was almost invariably in a suit, so you can’t really blame my friend for being disappointed.
For those of you who never really watched Gossip Girl, the fashion on the show was overall much more dressy than what the typical high schooler would wear. Girls don’t wear heels or cute preppy flats to high school. (As fun as that sounds to me personally.)
Gossip Girl’s fashion wasn’t relatable or even remotely attainable, but maybe that’s part of what I loved about it.
Gossip Girl’s fashion wasn’t relatable or even remotely attainable, but maybe that’s part of what I loved about it. There’s this big push for modern TV shows to represent what our world looks like, but maybe that’s not what I want in entertainment. Since when was entertainment supposed to look exactly like real life? I love Gossip Girl for the same reason I love Hallmark movies. It’s like a dream world. It’s escapism from a world not full of colorful tights and headbands.
But to me, that was the point of Gossip Girl, in the first place. You were transported to this world so incredibly unlike your own. If, in the attempt to modernize it, it loses that sense of fantasy, then the reboot will be missing the whole point of why so many people loved the original.
Was the fashion of the show out of reach for the average person? Absolutely. They were playing rich kids on the Upper East Side after all. And sure, it was pretentious at times. Ice queen Blair Waldorf once got mad at a girl for wearing last season’s shoes. Not exactly quite like you and me, that’s for sure.
In the attempt to modernize the show, the reboot loses the sense of fantasy that appealed to so many fans of the original.
As with all reboots, remakes, anything of that nature the question ultimately becomes whether it can live up to the original. On that front, I have no doubts. The answer is a resounding no. After all, who could live up to Blair and Serena? The chemistry seems hard to recreate (even if it is a reboot and not a remake). So I’ll be watching to see if it will be something I can even enjoy at all.
Closing Thoughts
For me and so many of the fans of the original Gossip Girl, the fashion was such a huge part of what we enjoyed about the show. I’m not so sure how much I’ll be enjoying the reboot after all. I’ll be watching to see if it just feels like every other modern teen drama on Freeform because if that’s the case, I’m out. As much as I love the original Gossip Girl, when I hear the words, “You know you love me, xoxo” again for the first time in the reboot, it remains to be seen whether or not that will still be true.