As inconceivable as it might sound, all through its total six-season run, the unique Gossip Lady collection by no means noticed its characters attend the Met Gala. Contemplating the whole present was about fashion-obsessed, über-wealthy youngsters who dominated New York society, it’s virtually absurd that Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf didn’t ever brawl on the metropolis’s greatest and brightest occasion. I imply, they even met on the Met steps every day earlier than college, for God’s sake!
Blame boring previous logistics for this narrative hole.
“Stephanie [Savage] and I wished to do it the primary time round. We tried—we began down the street and the street was good,” Gossip Lady reboot showrunner Josh Safran, who was additionally government producer on the collection’ unique run, tells Self-importance Honest. “The one downside grew to become that, given the community schedule, we’d have needed to produce the Met Gala ourselves in February earlier than it could occur in actual life, and again after we made the unique, the [gala] theme was not introduced that early. We additionally didn’t essentially have the finances again then to do it.”
Fortunately—and earlier than its premature demise—the Gossip Lady reboot on HBO Max supplied each the chance and, importantly, the finances to make a Met Gala occur. Its second season was timed completely to coincide with the 2022 Met Gala themed “In America: An Anthology of Style,” as our Constance Billard–St. Jude’s college students have been of their spring semester at the moment. And for a present identified to have each episode culminate in a Large Occasion, the place larger or higher to finish the season (and, once more, the collection) than on the Met Gala?
By Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max.
Whereas the staff briefly thought-about filming at the true deal, recreating the occasion made extra sense from a manufacturing perspective, which is how a second set of Met steps, all decked out within the gala’s theme, was recreated on a soundstage at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. “We constructed a duplicate of the steps to measurement,” Safran says. “It’s in all probability the costliest set we ever constructed for the present—like, by far.”
There have been no shortcuts right here: It wasn’t potential to have actual carpeting, as a result of cameras wanted to have the ability to transfer up and down, so set designers painted sisal to copy the sample seen in each shot from the 2022 occasion. And within the cameo division, Gossip Lady introduced in trend insiders like Vogue’s José Criales-Unzueta and Oscar de la Renta’s Fernando Garcia to play bit components and higher nail that inside-access really feel, peppering the occasion with particulars that solely these within the know would absolutely recognize.
As is usually the case for Gossip Lady—and undoubtedly the case for the Met Gala, each actual and imagined—the true star of the present is the style. Gossip Lady costume designer Eric Daman noticed a possibility to make use of the second—usually a straight-from-runway highlight for most of the world’s largest, most established homes—to showcase an eclectic mixture of all-American items, together with some from lesser-known designers, archival items, classic, and even some heritage handcrafts that nodded to the gala’s themes whereas staying true to the present’s characters.
