[This profile contains discussion of eating disorders, abuse, and sexual assault.]
Season Two
Blair returns from Europe with a new beau, James. For her end of the summer in the Hamptons, she favors brightly colored floral dresses, headbands, and one-piece swimsuits, often worn with her initial or nameplate necklaces. She’s only dating James to make Chuck jealous, faking the “bloom” of her love with floral prints; she becomes genuinely interested in James when he reveals that his real name is Lord Marcus Beaton, and he’s the son of a British duke.
Chuck, unable to say “I love you,” can’t compete with real live royalty. Blair adores Roman Holiday, Grace Kelly, even Marie Antoinette—the subject of the mural in her bedroom. She wants to impress Marcus’s stepmother, the duchess, and throws a staid party complete with classical music (2.2). She even wears her Waldorf nameplate necklace with her cream-and-black floral strapless dress and pearl headband. Blair’s name means a lot in New York circles, but it’s not enough to impress Duchess Catherine: “Marcus is never going to end up with a lowly Waldorf,” she says.
Blair blackmails the duchess into approval, but her relationship with Marcus is still lacking. They haven’t had sex, despite Blair’s urging. When she references the library scene in Atonement, Marcus replies, “Blair, that’s not you. You’re a delicate little flower, nothing like that tart Keira Knightley” (2.3). Marcus’s framing of Blair as a “delicate little flower” not only calls back to all the florals she wore at the beginning of their relationship but also reinforces Blair’s ideas about her sexual desires—that they’re something depraved and dirty, nothing to be encouraged.
Chuck, meanwhile, decides to use sex with Blair to end a streak of impotence. He has always been fascinated, he says, by Blair’s “cool exterior and the fire below”—her “good,” restrained side and her “bad,” sexual one. The problem is, Marcus wants only the former and Chuck wants only the latter.
Chuck tries to seduce Blair at her back-to-school party, even pretends to be Marcus in the dark of a city-wide blackout. Blair wears a yellow one-shouldered Grecian-like dress and gold headband—again, wearing yellow and gold, like Serena, when her sexual history is being used against her.
After Marcus discovers Chuck and Blair kissing, Blair is finally able to ask for what she wants: “I’m not some delicate little flower. Show me you want me.” Blair and Marcus kiss, and for this moment at least, Blair’s two sides are reconciled.
In the next episode, however, Blair receives proof that Marcus and Catherine are sleeping together. She’s distraught, of course—think of it, this is her second serious relationship in which her boyfriend has cheated on her. Her dress calls back to the beginning of their relationship—a green, purple, and yellow floral dress, much like her brightly colored florals in the Hamptons.
While Blair boots Marcus and Catherine back to England, Serena inadvertently ascends to queen of Constance and walks in Eleanor’s runway show—as Blair said in 1.4, she can’t help but “take” things from her friend. Their rivalry travels with them to New Haven, where they both tour Yale’s campus (2.6).
The morning of the visit, Blair has another Audrey dream—this time, My Fair Lady. Blair imagines herself as pre-transformation Eliza Doolittle, shabby in her dark layers; Serena as post-transformation Eliza, resplendent in the navy-and-white gown and hat from the movie’s horse race scene. The dean plays Henry Higgins—much more enchanted by Serena’s Eliza.
Their color palette carries over to the visit itself: Serena is light and appealing in a white-and-purple striped blazer and white blouse, while Blair is gloomy and severe in a yellow blouse and olive knit tie, cardigan, and skirt. Her interview with the dean follows Serena’s, and when he brings up Serena’s fashion show anecdote, Blair can’t help but let loose:
I know I must seem rather traditional. . . . Well, I’m aware I lack some people’s easy grace with strangers and I don’t exactly make you feel like you’ve know me forever even though we’ve just met. When I laugh, you might not smile just at the coquettish sound of it and I may not be spontaneous or delightful or full of surprises and my hair may not sparkle when it catches the light! Everything worth knowing about me is in that folder. I made sure of it.
What she lacks in charisma or spontaneity, Blair makes up for in control and perfection. Blair believes that if she does things the “traditional” way—wears a prim outfit, takes great care with her application—she will succeed. Both Serena and Blair are invited to dinner at the dean’s house—Blair conning her invitation—and the evening quickly descends into a nasty showdown.
They make up the next morning, both having gone to the dean to plead the other’s case. Serena is still the dean’s favorite for early admission, and Blair’s outfit reflects that. It’s a chaotic mix of colors and patterns: plaid skirt, zigzag blouse, color-blocked cloche, black scarf. This is not the coordinated, perfect Blair that we’ve come to expect; she looks lost, confused, all her planning for nothing.
For the next couple episodes, Blair and Chuck go back to their games. After Blair won’t say “I love you” to Chuck, he tells her to chase him—and she does, in outfits that play with the two sides of her being: on the surface, she’s studious in a white plaid shirt, blue tie, and blue-and-black houndstooth skirt; she unbuttons the skirt to reveal white lace-trimmed stockings.
Still, neither Chuck nor Blair can bring themselves to say those three words: “I think we both know the moment we [say “I love you”] it won’t be the start of something, it will be the end,” says Chuck (2.8). “What we like is [the game].” Much like Blair can’t reconcile her “light” and “dark” sides, Chuck and Blair can’t quite understand how to merge their sexual games with the outward presentation of a “normal” relationship: “Chuck and Blair at the movies, Chuck and Blair holding hands.”
It’s only when Chuck spirals after his father’s death that Blair says, “I love you”—returned, by Chuck, with “Well, that’s too bad” (2.13).
Blair wants to start a new life post–high school, without Chuck. She’s received an invitation to the exclusive Colony Club, and for her tea with the members, she chooses a black dress with a silver diamanté neckline and black beret—what Blair, I imagine, thinks is the mature equivalent of a headband. Serena tries to shame Blair into leaving her tea to help Chuck, who’s crashing and burning at the Victrola. “I’m not abandoning Chuck,” Blair replies. “I’m just saving myself.”
In her Audrey dress, Blair looks out of place among the Colony Club members—country club preppy in pastels, argyle, and pearls. They are also incredibly catty, judging Serena and her outfits, the Basses and their new money. “I thought I was leaving high school behind,” Blair says. “I guess you never do.” And with that, she leaves to rescue Chuck, thus enforcing a false dichotomy: the Colony Club or Chuck, “good” or “bad.” Blair could create a new life for herself and not need some society matrons to do so, and yet the show brings her back to Chuck, again and again, to be emotionally pummeled.
In episode sixteen, Blair is wait-listed at Yale, receiving a spot only after Serena declines her admission. Blair wears very little of Yale’s school color, blue, in this episode, save for touches on her school uniform. In fact, to the opera, she wears a tiered dress in orange—the opposite of blue on the color wheel. To protect her perfect grades for Yale, she’s hazed a new teacher who gave her a B—inviting Miss Carr to dinner and the opera, then abandoning her at the restaurant. Though Blair apologizes for lashing out, Miss Carr informs the headmistress.
Blair attends tea with the headmistress, anticipating congratulations on Yale, only to learn that her admission has been put on probation until she completes detention. Her outfit, much like her chaotic look on Yale’s campus, reflects her emotional state, her expectation to attend Yale in the fall clashing with her reality: her coat, blouse, and skirt in three different autumnal plaids.
Blair loses her spot at Yale in episode eighteen; it goes to her academic rival, Nelly, after the college is told that Blair hazed a teacher. Blair just happens to be playing Countess Olenska in the school’s production of The Age of Innocence, and her fall from grace gives her insight into her character, a “ruined woman with no prospects.”
Her Countess Olenska costume doesn’t look like Michelle Pfeifer’s costumes in the film version. Rather, her costume is yet another variation on her Audrey cosplay: a high-necked black lace gown with a silver brooch. It’s an appropriately mournful outfit, the dress and jewelry evoking the widow’s weeds and mourning brooches of the Gilded Age.
Blair spends the next episode burning her life down, while Serena and Chuck try to douse the flames. At a van der Bilt party, she attempts to seduce Chuck: “Do you remember the first time you saw the real me?” she asks him. “The night Blair danced for you at Victrola. The Blair with none of the hang-ups, none of the frustrations. That’s the Blair right here.” The “bad,” “dark” Blair, I should add.
Chuck turns her down—“It’s not the Blair I want”—and yet again, Blair is told she cannot possibly contain two sides, that she must be one or the other. And yet, her party outfit reflects both: a blue-and-white bandage dress, cream cardigan, and pearl nautical necklace. The bandage dress is unexpected, more body conscious than her usual A-line silhouettes. The color palette and necklace, however, are “good,” “light” Blair, the Blair who once thought she was going to marry Nate. Blues and nautical motifs are classic Archibald, and so it’s no surprise when Nate is the only person who can bring back that side of her.
He reminds Blair that she likes watching the same Audrey movies over and over because she “likes knowing how things are going to turn out.” While Chuck may want this side of Blair, Nate is the one who understands how to coax it out, why she needs control and reassurance; after a year of uncertainty, he makes her feel secure.
Nate and Blair get back together in the next episode, Blair in more blue. Even so, she can’t quite let go of her schemes or Chuck, and Blair and Nate break up at prom (2.24). By the time graduation has rolled around, Blair has secured a spot at NYU with the help of her stepfather, Cyrus Rose. Chuck, however, still hasn’t told Blair he loves her—though he’s admitted it to Serena and Nate.
At the graduation party (2.25), Blair decides to go bold: a silver-and-black dress with a black embellished headband and silver floral necklace. Gossip Girl called her a “weakling” in her graduation post, but Blair won’t accept the label: “I won’t let [Gossip Girl] be right about me. I won’t be weak anymore.”
She pulls Chuck aside for perhaps the cringiest scene in the series: as she undresses, she asks him what he thinks of each piece, hoping that when she asks what he thinks of her, he’ll finally reply, “I love you.” The look shares the same elements as her Audrey cosplay—black dress and silver embellishments—but shaken up. She’s stripping away all her usual costumery, vulnerable in her simple black bustier. Even her necklace looks like a cockeyed version of the one Chuck gave her in season one.
Chuck can compliment her headband and her dress, but he still can’t say those three words. Blair is left to give this advice to Jenny, her pick for the next queen of Constance: “You need to be cold to be queen. . . . You can’t make people love you, but you can make them fear you.” All at once, her outfit becomes a symbol of her connection with Jenny, also in a black dress.
Chuck finally says “I love you” in the last scene of the finale. He’s gone to France for Blair’s favorite macarons, to Germany for her favorite stockings (you can order online, Chuck!). While Chuck is dressed in a surprisingly simple and muted look, Blair’s is vibrant: a kelly-green coat layered over a yellow embellished cardigan and gold blouse, her headband a gold knot. The green feels springlike and fresh, the color of renewal, but the gold and yellow—usually the colors Serena wears when she’s most “desirable”—are somewhat ominous. Blair and Chuck may be going into the next season in love, but their relationship will soon be tested by their sexual games.
Season Three
Blair leaves her maximalist uniforms behind in season three, favoring, to quote Daman, “very sleek, very minimal, linear clothing that’s almost architectural in design” (“Gossip Girl Style with Eric Daman”). “Architectural,” I think, is particularly telling, considering the role a building will play later in the season. After all, Blair is the new girlfriend of a burgeoning real estate mogul, her color palette “morph[ing]” (“Style”) with Chuck’s.
Though she may be in a happy relationship, Blair is lost at NYU, her designer outfits unappreciated by her more activist- or literary-minded peers—represented by Vanessa Abrams and her old classmate Dan. On her first day (3.2), Blair wears a power-red peplum dress, her accessories a white python headband and gobs of pearls, practically screaming “MONEY.” Blair expects to become queen of NYU easily, so she’s surprised to find that her classmates want pizza and documentaries over her sushi and sake party.
For her party, she changes into the school color, a “royal . . . majestic purple” dress and headband. But, as Daman points out, the “lines here are very severe and again very minimalist and architectural . . . anti-NYU” (“Style”).
Not only that, but Blair’s enemy, Georgina, is her roommate and already much more popular than Blair. Georgina throws a rooftop party, and Blair asks Dan to be her date, hoping to absorb some of his newfound cool. She goes about as casual as Blair gets for the party, and in Humphrey neutrals, too: yellow tailored shorts and a brown printed blouse. Even her beaded necklace is brown, almost the opposite of the luxe pearls she was wearing earlier, so NYU that a fellow student compliments it. Dan tosses aside her yellow headband before they enter the party: “No headbands in college,” he says.
And indeed, even as Blair starts collecting some off-brand minions at NYU (dressing them in knockoffs of looks she wore earlier in the season), she rarely returns to headbands, never wielding quite the control she had at Constance.
Even her dreams have turned against her: In episode six, Blair imagines she’s Bette Davis in All About Eve, watching her rival, Vanessa as Eve, receive an award. Blair awakes in distress, telling Chuck, “I’m Audrey Hepburn! Not some plain Baby Jane.” Blair thinks of herself as the youthful, thin, vivacious Audrey—Holly Golightly or Princess Ann, not Bette as Margo Channing, a middle-aged actress bested by her younger competition. The dream’s looks are closely inspired by the movie’s outfits: Blair in a black off-the-shoulder gown with a brooch, Vanessa in a white gown with beaded cap sleeves. For Blair, black dresses symbolize Audrey, and so it must be especially distressing to wear one as Bette.
The dream is prompted by NYU’s freshman toast: Vanessa is Blair’s biggest rival for the honor. When asked, by Vanessa, why she deserves to deliver the toast, Blair descends into a racist rant in which she compares herself to Marie Antoinette. Blair is used to being queen, and not only that, to being served by minions, many of whom are women of color.
Jenny is now reigning as Constance’s queen, and Blair can’t help but grab at a little of her old power. She even offers to be Jenny’s cotillion mentor (3.9), all while wearing a thin black headband. In fact, I only noticed the headband, which almost blends into Blair’s brown hair, when Jenny called it out: “Your era’s over,” she tells Blair, “and so is that headband.” Jenny doesn’t wear headbands as queen, making the accessory as dated as Blair’s reign; she doesn’t attempt one again until season four.
As this season continues, Blair’s story lines become more and more centered in Chuck’s. He’s just met his mother, a woman he long thought to be dead, and Blair encourages him to open his heart to her. When a scandal forces Chuck to sign his new hotel, the Empire, over to his mother, he realizes she’s secretly allied with his smarmy uncle, Jack Bass.
Bubble Episode
At the beginning of episode seventeen, “Inglorious Bassterds,” Blair confides in Serena over shopping at Matthew Williamson, her outfit a black-and-gold belted dress, black lace tights, and a red Chanel bag. The black dress is very Blair, and yet the gold touches hint at what’s to come. Blair is worried that the betrayal will set Chuck back: “The hotel is proof that Bart was wrong about Chuck. It’s become who he is.”
Serena grabs a dress from the rack and presents it to Blair. “Once Chuck sees you in it, he’ll realize Empire or no Empire, Blair Waldorf loves him and no one else can say that.” Serena leaves to prepare for Nate’s birthday party, and Blair is left holding the dress, admiring herself with it in a mirror.
Suddenly, Jack appears: “She’s right,” he says. “It is a remarkable dress.” Chuck met with Jack that morning, and Jack offered his nephew an indecent proposal: he can have his Empire back, and “all it would cost is [Blair] spending the night with [Jack].”
Jack says Chuck shot down the idea, and so does Blair. When Jack tries to stroke her hair, she slaps his hand away; her gaze goes to the dress, now hung back on the rack. “You should at least try it on,” Jack tells her.
The dress, unsurprisingly, is Matthew Williamson. (The store, weirdly enough, did a window display tie-in for the episode that “feature[d] a brunette mannequin sporting the very same dress alongside window signage that read ‘What Did Chuck Do?’ and ‘Tune In’” (British Vogue).)
Daman chose the dress, a cream halter-neck with gold-and-turquoise beading across the bodice, because he “wanted it to represent innocence, purity, vulnerability—characteristics that are not usually explored with Blair’s character. . . . So the creamy draped chiffon was . . . [the] perfect incarnation to give a nod to Blair à la Joan of Arc or Fay Wray” (British Vogue).
Yes, Blair rarely wears white or cream gowns—as we’ve seen, over and over, she loves black for formal occasions, outfits built up like armor. In fact, the beading on this dress almost looks like a breastplate, perhaps one a high-fashion Joan of Arc would wear. And yet, I can’t help but come back to the gold and turquoise. As I’ve mentioned, gold is not Blair’s color but Serena’s. Blair also never wears turquoise; that’s Lily’s signature stone. Serena and Lily are frequently shamed, sometimes even by Blair, for their sexual histories, for their longer lists of partners; they were even both assaulted by Bass men—Chuck and Jack, respectively—who saw them as women of “reputation.” Perhaps this dress is meant to represent innocence or purity to the viewer, but I don’t think it does to Blair. I think it represents dirtiness and shame, her eye going to it as soon as Jack touches her.
Later that day, Jack sends a box to the Waldorf penthouse, accompanied by a note: “One last chance to save your man.” Even the card is gold. Soon after, Chuck tells Blair that Jack is going to close the hotel, that there is “no way” to save it. “I am everything my father said I was.” Believing she is the only person who can stop Jack from closing the Empire and Chuck from becoming his old self, Blair opens the box; inside is the dress.
Blair arrives at Jack’s Empire suite and quickly strips off her coat to reveal the gown, paired with a gold clutch. Always prepared, she’s had a contract drawn up; they sign it with a gold pen. Blair tries to undo the neck of the dress, but Jack stops her, kisses her.
A kiss is all he wants; “I prefer the woman to want to have sex with me,” he says. Jack seems to understand what Chuck doesn’t: manipulating Blair into trading sex for a hotel is rape. “Chuck chose to give me you [over the Empire],” Jack continues. “He told me exactly which buttons to push. . . . Who do you think sent me to [Matthew Williamson]?” Turns out, Chuck’s money paid for Blair’s dress.
Blair returns to the penthouse, where Chuck is waiting. She’s tied her coat, trying to hide every bit of the dress and her shame. Still, a piece of the beaded bodice peeks through at the collar. In the coat’s black mutton sleeves, Blair looks almost like a scorned Wharton character, her Countess Olenska, the gold like a cameo at her neck. She’s mourning her relationship, her now-broken trust in Chuck. He believes she slept with Jack and places equal blame on her: “You went up there on your own.” She slaps him and goes up to her bedroom.
At her vanity, she stares at her tearstained face, then pulls off the dress and climbs onto her bed. Underneath the dress, she is wearing a strapless romper, the bustier cream, like the dress, but the bottom ruffled black shorts. At her heart, she is light, “pure,” the “good” Blair, but below, she feels “dark” and dirty, shamed into thinking the setup was as much her fault as Chuck’s.
In the next episode, Blair briefly reunites with Chuck, unhappily wondering, “Who else could love me after what I’ve become?” They attend Dorota’s wedding together, he in a light gray suit, white shirt, and beige tie, and she in a beige-and-rose-gold dress, a variation on the gold from the previous episode. Before the ceremony, Chuck gifts her a rose-gold necklace, similar in style to her birthday present but this time smaller, unwanted. He’s happy to have Blair back, but Blair can barely contain her disgust: “We do belong together,” she tells him. “We’re both sick and twisted. If you think about it, we’re incredibly fortunate to have even found each other.”
Chuck and Blair are supposed to be the “happy couple,” the pair that escorts Dorota and her soon-to-be husband, Vanya. Worried that she and Chuck will bring the newlyweds bad luck, Blair confesses their unhappiness to the whole wedding party.
Dorota, ever Blair’s surrogate mother, says, “I wish you to be like me one day, to find right love, good love.” Blair agrees and tells Chuck that she wants “real love. Pure and simple love.” She’d rather be “bored than ashamed.” Once again, Blair has decided that she needs to choose between her “light” and “dark” sides, rather than find a balance between both.
In episode twenty, Blair visits Nate at Columbia and runs into some familiar faces: two Columbia freshmen who attended Eleanor’s fashion show in episode sixteen. Unlike her NYU classmates, the Columbia students are obsessed with Gossip Girl; they even wear headbands (though Blair corrects: “The bow goes on the right”).
Still miserable at NYU, Blair pretends she’s transferring to Columbia. She even wears a coat in one of Columbia’s colors, light blue, with a bright blue hat and bag. But still, no headband. Blair isn’t yet queen of Columbia, though she discovers, at the end of the episode, that Chuck secretly submitted her transfer application—she’s in.
A scheme brings Chuck and Blair in close proximity in episode twenty-one, but Blair isn’t sure if they should get back together. “If I got through my fear for you,” Chuck says, “you can for me.” (Uh, saying “I love you” when you’re scared isn’t the same as getting back with someone who treated you as property.) Chuck sets a ticking clock: Blair must meet him on the observation deck of the Empire State Building the next day or he’ll be lost to her forever.
Blair can’t decide whether to meet Chuck, but she takes her frequent sightings of the Empire State Building as signs that she should. (I would argue that’s just the nature of a very tall building.) Both her outfits in the episode call back to the two previous finales, to getting and losing Chuck. When she finds Chuck at the Empire, she wears a green cape over a black floral dress and a black-and-white polka dot scarf, the cape and yellow bag reminiscent of the bright green and yellow she wore when Chuck finally said “I love you.” They briefly reunite, only for Blair to learn that Chuck had questionably consensual sex with Jenny after he decided Blair wasn’t coming. Much like Chuck blamed Blair for the hotel trade, Blair directs most of her fury at Jenny, banishing her from the city.
Blair invites Serena to spend the summer in Paris. This time, she’s dressed in a nautical-inspired outfit, not unlike the one she wore in the season one finale, when Chuck abandoned her. The straw hat and navy-and-white cape remind us of her season one straw hat and sailor dress, while underneath are a boat-printed blouse and red pencil skirt. Blair is hoping to forget about Chuck and find new love in Paris, but even in her wardrobe, there’s always a little something to remind her of his betrayal.
[The last part, covering season four through the finale, will drop tomorrow, 6/4.]