Good Morning, Upper East Siders
Originally published 12/3/2020 on Substack
Welcome to Suds, a newsletter about teen soap opera fashion. I’m Chrisinda Lynch, a writer, costume design obsessive, and soap watcher.
Early in 2020, I volunteered, through a Facebook group, to participate in a variety show about Gossip Girl. I was going to give a PowerPoint breakdown of the show’s fashion. Stay-at-home happened instead, and I continued to slam my way through six seasons, with lots of opinions and no place to put them. Hence, a newsletter.
I’d watched the show before: the first four seasons as a teen with my mom; the fifth with my college roommates (afterward, I’d read Vulture recaps and reblog Dair gifsets on Tumblr). The sixth I’d refused to watch, fed up with the show’s insistence that an abusive relationship was its heart. Still, it was hard to completely let go: I watched the series finale while eating a piece of birthday cake from Magnolia Bakery and yelling at the screen. After all, I’d gone to New York for college (at a CUNY, which is where Dan should’ve gone if his family didn’t have money for Yale); the show had shaped my love for the city, my love for soapy story lines, my love for fashion. I was the same age as Jenny when I started watching Gossip Girl, and now I was older than she was when she left Constance behind forever. It’d taken me a little longer to learn.
I moved on to other shows: Mad Men, for example, and Mad Style, Tom and Lorenzo’s brilliant analysis of the show’s costume design. (And yes, I reblogged Stan and Peggy gifsets.) I absorbed how to read the subtext of costumes while watching a show or movie, and when I came back to Gossip Girl, almost a decade later, I was ready to look at it with fresh eyes.
The Soap of It All
Most TV dramas are indebted to soap operas, both daytime and primetime. Even Jon Hamm admitted, on ABC’s The Story of Soaps, that Mad Men was a soap. In fact, take most any prestige TV show, strip away its critical accolades and white male antihero, and you have a soap opera. Dick Whitman assumed the identity of Don Draper to escape his cruel family after a traumatic childhood in a brothel? What the hell do you think that is??
Gossip Girl takes up the long tradition of rich-teen primetime soaps, from Beverly Hills, 90210 to GG’s sister show, The OC, and, more broadly, the long tradition of rich-adult primetime soaps, beginning with Dallas and Dynasty. The show picks up these threads of costume design: the costumes clearly grounding each character’s personality and background even as the story lines toss them into impossible scenarios, while also existing in a different kind of reality, heightened by money and youth and hubris.
The show’s costume designer, Eric Daman, was uniquely suited to the world of wealthy Upper East Siders. He’d worked under Patricia Field on Sex and the City, a New York show that dealt in archetypes (Future Chrisinda compared the two shows here). Not only that but Daman understood how important fashion and brands were to a teen girl’s identity (even covertly observing UES private school cliques, their Tory Burch flats and Coach purses) while never trying to chase trends. Instead, through the Constance girls, he established his own take on private school fashion, and therefore, his own trends. He avoided the issue that many costume designers face, as discussed in this video: how to dress contemporary characters without dating the show or movie by the time it’s released. (No wonder he’s returning as costume designer for the reboot, which hopefully will be less white and hetero than the original.)
Above all, Daman grasped what Blair herself opined to Dan in season four, what makes the show’s costumes worthy of analysis and discussion beyond their expensive labels and beautiful designs:
Fashion is the most powerful art there is. It’s movement, design, and architecture all in one. It shows the world who we are and who we’d like to be, just like your scarf suggests that you’d like to sell used cars.
So, How Will This Work?
The soaps I’ll be discussing in this newsletter will mainly be teen primetime, perhaps with some forays into adult primetime or daytime. The first volume, of course, will be dedicated to Gossip Girl, and I’m open to suggestions for other shows for future volumes.
Issues drop every Thursday: The majority will be profiles, each focusing on one of the main characters: Blair Waldorf, Serena van der Woodsen, Chuck Bass, Dan Humphrey, Vanessa Abrams, Nate Archibald, Jenny Humphrey, Lily Rhodes (look, I’m going with her maiden name for simplicity), and Rufus Humphrey. The profiles will run through the evolution of the character’s costume design, season by season, and include a closer look at an episode that encapsulates their fashion. Interspersed with these character profiles will be essays on other topics around the show’s fashion.
There are lots of slideshows of the most iconic outfits on Gossip Girl; this volume will not be that. Expect some hot takes, some gasoline poured on the trash fire that was season six. If you’re hoping for a post on Blair’s second wedding dress, then buckle up because it’s almost 2021 and I’m not doing that. We can consume things we critique; we can critique things we consume, and by god, I have some critiques. These rich people have been living rent-free in my head (wealthy people always receive the greatest subsidies), and the rent’s about to become due.
See you next week for my first profile, a deep dive into the fashion of Jenny Humphrey. XOXO.
DP on GG
Each issue will end with a quote from my partner, Daniel, who spent the last six months overhearing episodes of Gossip Girl from various rooms of our apartment. He still doesn’t understand the show and he doesn’t care.
DP: The only character I’m rooting for is the guillotine.
If you know someone who loves fashion, soaps, or both, I’d so appreciate if you could send this newsletter their way. A basic knowledge of Gossip Girl is helpful but by no means required.
