The Fantasy of Serena van der Woodsen

Part One of Three

[This profile contains discussion of suicide and sexual assault.]

From the moment she walks through Grand Central Terminal, Serena van der Woodsen becomes a mythic figure: beautiful, charismatic, effortless in her style. She “picks up whatever [clothes] she finds on the floor”—likely designer—and wears “them with her old jeans and her great boots and her slouchy cap” (“Gossip Girl Couture”). Many of her most memorable pieces are in gold or yellow, the color of her voluminous blond hair, the overall effect like “staring into the sun” (“5 Years of Iconic Style”). (Even her bedrooms, in both her family’s and the Waldorfs’ penthouses, are done in gold and yellow.) She just can’t believe she’s the center of attention, all while wearing the most light-catching gold sequined dress. Everything about Serena, from her long waves to her glittering dresses to her dripping chain necklaces, is tactile, sensual—something to touch. For Serena’s costumes and story lines, from the very first episode, when we learn that she slept with her best friend’s boyfriend at the Shepherd wedding, are always imbued with sex and desire.

In past profiles, I’ve talked about the way Gossip Girl costumes quietly reinforce the show’s messaging about sex—the way Jenny Humphrey’s costumes reflect her “purity” or Vanessa Abrams’s Snowflake Ball dress hypersexualizes her body. But until Serena, I hadn’t come across a character whose costumes were overtly discussed, both by the show’s producers and costume designers, in terms of sex. In special extras like “Gossip Girl Couture” and “5 Years of Iconic Style,” grown adults describe Serena’s high school uniform as “a bit sexier, a little more askew” and “a tousled, sexy, just-rolled-out-of-bed look”; her style inspiration as a model off duty like Kate Moss, then in her thirties. That’s not to say that a sixteen-year-old girl can’t want to be sexy and sexual, but rather that Serena’s sexuality is filtered through this adult lens, infusing her messiness, her youthfulness, her carelessness, with a kind of ease and easiness.

During Gossip Girl’s run, media coverage picked up on the sexiness and sexualization of the character and her fashion, even if it was only to poke fun: Vulture’s recaps kept track of Serena’s employment of the “cleavage rhombus.” The red carpet blog Go Fug Yourself bestowed the nickname “Boobs Legsly” on Serena’s actress, Blake Lively, for her legs- and cleavage-baring outfits. And I do think, as the show continued past high school and Lively’s fame grew, the media had difficulty separating the actress from the character, especially as Lively became more hands-on with Serena’s costuming. As head costume designer Eric Daman told Fashionista, “Blake and Serena had a symbiotic relationship, in a way, stylistically. . . . She got more and more involved in that way as Serena grew and as Blake grew.” Serena even received her own Fitzgerald adaptation story line less than a year after Lively auditioned to play Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

Still, even as Serena’s arc and style develop, moving from school uniforms and sparkly dresses to workwear, she can never quite find the happy medium between the guilt-ridden girl who ran away from the Shepherd wedding and the idealized object that her first love, Dan Humphrey, created. She can’t help but return, again and again, to Dan, to the fantasy she so wants to be, the validation she craves after years of being told that she is “beautiful” and “sexy” and not much else. For as much as Gossip Girl loves to sexualize Serena, the show would never allow her to remain bad Serena—debauched Serena. No, Serena must become good Serena, golden Serena, controlled Serena—properly married and put into place.

Season One

Serena returns to the city in the pilot, having spent her sophomore year at boarding school in Connecticut. In Grand Central, she is spotted by Dan, a classmate and scholarship student who’s long harbored a crush on her. As discussed in his profile, her outfit mirrors his: both in striped tops and brown jackets, Serena’s a Breton-style navy-and-white shirt and a brown leather jacket, paired with a gray tailored vest, jeans, boots, and brown leather Coach bag. Around her neck, she’s knotted a jaunty gold kerchief. The overall effect is much more restrained and conservative than we’ll ever see again—covered, literally, from neck to toe. She’s about to convince her friends, her family, that she’s looking for a fresh start, to leave behind her years of sex, drugs, and parties.

Serena ran away to boarding school without saying goodbye to her best friend, Blair Waldorf, and Blair is reluctant to resume their friendship, her past year spent soaking up all the attention Serena left behind; Blair is reigning queen of their high school, Constance Billard School for Girls.

The differences between the two girls are obvious from the first instances of their uniforms. Blair is coordinated, rule-following, in a high-neck blouse and crossover tie. Serena leaves her tie undone, her collar unbuttoned and tails untucked; throws a glittery, attention-grabbing trench on top. Her skirt, even, is shorter and a different pattern than the other juniors’. To quote Daman:

[Serena] wears her school’s uniform skirt from her freshman year, so it’s a different plaid than the other girls are wearing. . . . I think it worked really, really well that she didn’t wear collared shirts, and that we saved that for Blair and her cronies. That was the initial thing that set the two looks apart, that we took a little bit of liberty; Serena was such a free spirit that she was like, “I’m just going to wear my Henley and my skinny tie” (Fashionista).

Now, as you might’ve noticed from this first uniform, Serena does occasionally wear a collared blouse to school, almost always when she wants to be seen as serious and mature, as she does in the pilot. Otherwise, Serena usually favors a white Henley or T-shirt with her uniform, no collar to tighten her tie around.

Serena convinces Blair to meet her for a drink and then arrives all in cream and white—blazer, shirt, necklace. Blair herself is dressed in a black turtleneck, their black and white outfits setting up their initial dichotomy on the show: reformed angel and scheming witch, “good” and “bad.” Though Blair is initially resistant, the girls make up. Once Blair leaves, Chuck Bass offers to get Serena something to eat in the kitchen; his father, Bart, owns the building.

In the kitchen, Chuck reveals that he knows what happened at the Shepherd wedding. He tells Serena that she’s “more like [him]” than she wants to admit, forces himself on her; he, too, is dressed in light colors, pastels, and suddenly the color scheme highlights this shared secret, Chuck’s perception of their mutual wickedness. The scene cuts between this attempted assault and Serena and Nate Archibald sleeping together, Serena in a gold tulle dress, as luxe as the Campbell Apartment around them. The comparison is jarring, the dreamy soft focus of the flashback juxtaposed with the harsh light of the present day.

Serena manages to escape Chuck’s grip, and as she runs out of the kitchen, she accidentally bumps into Dan and drops her cell phone. Dan comes back to the hotel the next day to return it and leaves with a date with Serena. In this scene, she’s wearing cream again, this time a dress, and a gray plaid trench—plaid being the Humphrey pattern of choice.

For their date, Serena chooses a gold sequined minidress with black tights and booties, outside paired with a black scarf and denim jacket. She stands on the hotel’s stairway, glittering, the scarf and jacket not yet on; when Dan spots her, he’s mesmerized. Gold symbolizes wealth, success, splendor, and so Serena wears the color (or its lesser cousin, yellow) when she’s at her most desirable, and often, her most unattainable. It’s no wonder that Dan can’t look away, his fantasy staring down from her pedestal.

The next morning (1.2), Serena stops by the Waldorf penthouse, but Blair no longer wants to be friends; Nate told her about the Shepherd wedding. “I always took you for a whore,” she tells Serena. “I never knew you were a liar, too.”

Serena’s mother, Lily, wants her to attend the Bass brunch; Serena agrees to go if she can bring Dan. The “whore” comment still echoing in her mind, Serena yet again chooses white, this time a glittery, flower-embroidered dress, little touches of gold from her coin purse and necklaces. The dress is sweet, almost childish; the flowers unexpected. Serena rarely wears florals, but Blair frequently does, and so the dress feels like a white flag to her best friend. A best friend, I should add, who has no interest in reconciliation. At the brunch, Blair tells Dan about the Shepherd wedding; he leaves, his perfect image of Serena shattered.

Both Serena and Dan, and Serena and Blair, make up by episode four. In episode five, Dan takes Serena on their first real date, complete with a town car and a fancy restaurant and everything Serena finds boring on the Upper East Side.

Not knowing Dan is planning such an elaborate night, she initially dresses in a striped tank, jeans, silver feather earrings, and brown boots and a hobo bag—the stripes a shared pattern between her and Dan since the pilot. When she sees Dan in his suit and tie, she changes into a dressier look—a studded black cocktail dress and sheer tights, keeping the earrings but taking a black quilted purse that her mother insists on. Ultimately, they end up playing pool at a dive bar, the perfect date abandoned for something more suited to both of them.

Their relationship progresses over the next few episodes, Dan accompanying Serena to a masked ball in episode six. Yet again, she is in her power colors, gold and yellow: a yellow gown with a black furry shrug and gold filigree mask.

In episode seven, Dan and Serena almost have sex for the first time. Both are nervous, Dan because he’s never had sex before and Serena because she has and never connected with her partner, always treated as a vessel, not a person. “I wish [I was a virgin],” she confesses to Dan. “It’s just, no one’s ever looked at me the way you just did. In fact, I don’t think they looked at me at all.”

As the season goes on, we get more glimpses of this old Serena, the “bad” Serena, the Serena who had multiple sex partners and did drugs and drank more heavily. In episode nine, Dan flashes back to the previous Thanksgiving, when he ran into drunk Serena on the street. Old Serena doesn’t dress like new Serena; in this scene, she wears an emerald-green dress, leopard coat, black tights and booties; her hair flat-ironed. In costume design, leopard print is sometimes used to denote tawdriness or sexual availability, so a whole coat of it tells us exactly how we’re supposed to see this old Serena: tackier, looser, wilder. (I mean, “Promiscuous” is playing in the background. These aren’t exactly subtle cues.) Unsurprisingly, the only gold on Serena’s body is a pair of earrings; though Dan is still drawn to her, she is not yet a fully realized fantasy.

Back in the present day (1.10), Lily convinces Serena to attend cotillion, pushed by her own mother, CeCe. CeCe even lines up a date for Serena, an Upper East Sider named Carter Baizen. Serena and Dan almost fall out when he tells her about her grandmother’s manipulations, but they end up reuniting at cotillion, the gold back of Dan’s vest matching Serena’s gold brocade gown and little gold earrings.

In episode eleven, they sleep together for the first time on Christmas Eve, Serena in a sequined dress, the cranberry color perfect for the holiday season; it may not be gold, but her necklace is, and sequins still give her a bit of Serena sparkle. Before they have sex, Dan presents her with the short story he wrote about her, about to be published in The New Yorker. It chronicles the first time they met, at a party freshman year—built up so much in Dan’s head that it’s become mythic, epic.

Serena and Dan’s relationship is not without tension; Dan often points out the privileges of being a van der Woodsen. When Serena confesses to breaking into Constance Billard’s pool (1.12), she receives a laxer punishment than the expulsion promised, her mother’s new fiancé, Bart, having secretly donated a new library to the school. In her meeting with Headmistress Queller, Serena wears a long-sleeved navy T-shirt, gray sweater vest, and her usual uniform skirt and loose tie. She normally pairs at least a white Henley or T-shirt with her uniform, and so further deviation—to navy—only highlights how different the rules are for Serena.

As much as the van der Woodsen name may serve her, Serena can’t quite escape the trauma that comes with it. In episode thirteen, Dan tells Serena that he loves her, and she avoids a reply—haunted, she later says, by the ghosts of her mother’s failed marriages. She asks him to explain why he loves her, and he tells her she’s “beautiful, smart, sexy as hell . . . [and] completely unaware of [her] effect on [him].” It’s a very One Direction understanding of love—two out of four things being her appearance, and the fourth being that she has no idea of the others. Still, with Dan’s reasons in mind, Serena is finally able to return the sentiment.

Their happiness, however, is short-lived: In episode fifteen, Serena’s old friend Georgina Sparks returns; Georgina, who “always brought out the devil” in Serena. Not wanting Dan to know Georgina, Serena begins lying to him, covering up where she’s been, wearing little of the gold or yellow or sparkles that light her up in his eyes. The night before the SATs, Serena goes out to dinner with Georgina, who drugs her soda. The next morning, she wakes up late and misses the exam; Georgina offers her blackout as a sign Serena hasn’t “changed as much as [she] thought.”

As Georgina reenters Serena’s life, Serena’s style can’t help but become tangled in her old friend’s. Georgina’s wardrobe leans rock-and-roll: lots of black, leather jackets, silver studs and chains. To their dinner, for example, Serena chooses a white top, tangled necklace, black pants and boots. On top, she wears a brown open sweater—like a new Serena piece—but with a silver-studded black trim—like a Georgina piece.

Serena tells Georgina never to contact her again, then doesn’t hear from her for two weeks—only to meet Georgina as Dan’s new friend, “Sarah,” and learn that she has an incriminating recording of her. After the Shepherd wedding, Serena went to Georgina, her tulle dress in hand, her gold slip almost covered by Nate’s white button-down—a shameful reminder of what they’d done together, her luminance stripped away.

Georgina, however, was secretly planning to make a sex tape of Serena and their friend Pete. Instead, the tape captured Pete overdosing, Georgina convincing Serena to abandon him in his hotel room as he died. From there, Serena got on a train to Connecticut, where she ended up at boarding school.

In the present day, Serena escapes back into her old ways, spending the night out drinking. When Dan wants to know where she’s been, she lies and says she cheated, and he breaks up with her. “I would rather Dan think that I cheated on him than know what I really did,” Serena tells her friends. “Dan puts me on a pedestal. If he knew the truth, he would never look at me again” (1.17).

With the help of her mother and friends, Serena comes to terms with Pete’s death and is finally ready to tell Dan the truth. Georgina gets to him first—stealing his phone and fooling around with him at the Humphreys’ loft.

With Serena’s honesty come the last gasps of gold and yellow: to the loft, she wears a navy dress, beaded necklaces, and gold trench. She still wants to fix things with Dan, to become that perfect girl again. She’s willing to overlook his hookup with Georgina, but Dan can’t move past her lies and scandalous past. At her mother’s wedding to Bart, they break up for good, Serena in a yellow floral bridesmaid gown with a black belt and gloves. “We’re exactly where we were at the Bass brunch,” she tells him. “I’m not who you thought I was and you can’t forgive that.” Yes, they’re in the same color palette but completely different worlds: Serena’s dress by Ralph Lauren, the flowers tying her to Lily and Blair. She decides to spend the summer reflecting alone in the Hamptons, Dan remaining in the city.

Season Two

Serena’s Hamptons wardrobe is easy breezy: lots of flat sandals, casual printed dresses, and cover-ups over swimsuits—including, naturally, a gold tunic over a black suit. She and Dan still miss each other, and when he comes to the Hamptons to find her, they reunite at the White Party.

Gold may not fit the White Party’s dress code, but Serena still looks like she’s stepped out of a myth; she wears a white Grecian gown with a large pearl cuff, silver chains threaded through her hair. The next morning, she and Dan decide to think about the reasons they broke up before they get back together.

Once they return to the city, Serena calls Dan and invites him to Blair’s party (2.2). Her outfit in this scene becomes her formula for the rest of the summer: instead of cover-ups and swimsuits, jeans and sleeveless going-out tops—in this case, white jeans and a Creamsicle-colored tank. As Serena talks to Dan, she picks an outfit for the event, holding up a honeycomb-print dress. Though she doesn’t wear the dress to Blair’s party, its cameo and their reluctance to delve into their issues foreshadow their breakup in the next episode.

On a walk in the park, Dan and Serena are confronted by the first appearance of the minis: preteen Gossip Girl readers who dress like their idols, Blair and Serena. The girls can’t believe that Dan and Serena are dating again, that they can forgive each other for their wrongs. While Serena wears her current go-to, a green sleeveless top and jeans, mini Serena is dressed in a little denim vest, orange tank top, and gray jeans, so much like an outfit that Serena wore at the beginning of her relationship with Dan, in episode 1.4. It’s almost as if she’s being visited by a Ghost of Serena Past, warning her not to repeat her mistakes.

Later that day, Serena and Dan break up in a stalled elevator, Serena wearing the honeycomb dress she almost wore the previous episode—only delaying the inevitable.

Their first day back at school is awkward, made more so by Dan’s flirtation with a new student, Amanda. Serena’s uniform is much like the previous year’s: a white T-shirt, cream-colored vest, loose tie, and plaid skirt. Her accessories, however, add new interest: in her hair, a printed scarf, and on her neck, a dart-shaped pendant. Serena wore similar scarves a few times in season one but rarely with her uniform; crown-like accessories were always the realm of Queen B and her headbands. As for the dart, Dan better watch out—once Dan goes on a date with Amanda, it’s war between the former couple.

Amanda was hired by Chuck, who hopes jealousy will drive Serena to take control and replace Blair as queen of Constance. His plan works: One morning, the minions are suddenly dressed like Serena, in loose ties, layered necklaces, and scarves. Serena herself wears a white T, loose tie, oatmeal-colored vest, and pink scarf. When she sees the flummoxed Blair, Serena unties her scarf from her hair and sweetly drapes it around her friend’s shoulders. Her power, the gesture seems to say, lies not in an accessory; she can bestow it upon whomever she wishes.

By 2.6, Serena and Blair are in a full-blown feud, fueled by Serena walking in Eleanor Waldorf’s fashion show with her socialite friends in episode five. Serena receives a personal invitation to visit Blair’s dream college, Yale—the inviting dean somehow enchanted by the publicity a girl like Serena could bring to his school, a three-hundred-year-old Ivy League institution. When Blair makes fun of Serena’s first choice, Brown, Serena decides to visit Yale instead, where she charms the dean over the more academically qualified—and less charismatic—Blair. By the end of the episode, Serena and Blair do make up, but not before Blair tells the dean about Pete and his overdose—a night Serena can’t escape, again and again.  

For her campus visit, Serena chooses a white-and-purple-striped schoolboy blazer with a gold crest, low-cut white blouse, jeans, and knee-high boots. The outfit is an interesting juxtaposition between how Serena wants to be perceived and how she is. She wants to be challenged and supported academically, to attend a college that wants her for her abilities—hence the collegiate blazer—but she has always been seen as a beautiful, passive object, something to be written about and desired—hence the low-cut blouse.

Unlike Blair or Lily, Serena rarely dresses in what the Upper East Side considers “appropriate” for an occasion. There’s always something slightly off, her dress a little too short, her neckline a little too low, a blazer thrown on top for decorum. Her new stepfather, Bart, wants to correct her and brings back a suit from his work trip to Paris (2.7): “conservative but classic,” as Lily describes it. He and Lily are setting new rules for their joined household—no going out on school nights and curfew on the weekends.

When Serena discovers these rules are motivated by Bart’s impending deals with some Midwestern executives, she goads him, going out to find some paparazzi in an orange halter dress and gold heels. The dress is probably the shortest she’s ever worn on the show, the message obvious: I know exactly what you think of me, and I don’t care.

At the Bass housewarming party, she sends this message again, this time with Bart’s gifted suit—no top underneath—and a tanked interview with InStyle. And yet, her sartorial rebellion leads to a real conversation with Lily about her parenting and a temporary peace among the van der Woodsens and Basses.

Over the next few episodes, Serena begins seeing Aaron Rose, a slightly older artist with an installation at Rufus Humphrey’s gallery. She can’t resist the chance to become a muse to a photographer, as she was to Dan as a writer. In 2.10, Aaron takes her portrait, Serena wearing a gray T-shirt dress with gold sequined sleeves and black tights. Her dress is not quite the full-on gold gown of season one, but the sequins show she certainly feels more sparkly, desirable, under his lens.

Serena soon learns that Aaron is polyamorous—with dates and subjects—and breaks it off, but a conversation with Blair begins to change her mind:

Blair: Beneath that free spirit façade, you’re totally conventional, just like I am.

Serena: It’s not a façade. I believe in freedom, people following their hearts, doing what they want; you know I always wished I’d lived in the sixties.

Blair: You believe in long hair, peasant skirts, and sandals, but you in an open relationship, I don’t think so.

Blair sees Serena’s image in stylistic terms—an embracement of hippie fashion rather than ideals. So it’s appropriate that, when Aaron shows up at her penthouse and says he thought she didn’t want a life like their parents’, Serena makes an unconventional outfit choice: she throws a plaid trench over her nightgown and takes him for a walk in Central Park. The coat is the same one she wore when she agreed to her first date with Dan—a reminder, perhaps, that Serena would rather be in a monogamous relationship with him.

The next episode is also the next instance of Serena pairing a button-down with her uniform. Sure, the shirt is rumpled, and she’s wearing it with a brown leather vest and loose tie, but the choice is a little more mature, controlled, like she’s trying to appear in Aaron’s eyes.

Indeed, later that day, he says he wants to close their relationship. She’s delighted, so much so that when Aaron tells her he’s sober, she lies and says she doesn’t drink either.

Still, she can’t hide “old Serena” for long, even if she asks Dan and Chuck not to talk to Aaron about her partying days. To their Thanksgiving dinner, she wears a red-and-orange minidress, short enough that Chuck makes a skeevy comment, the color and hemline reminiscent of the orange halter dress from a few episodes before. Aaron realizes that Serena is lying, but instead of rejecting her, as she likely expects, he asks her to tell him about her past.

Lots of things happen over the next few episodes: Bart dies in a car crash, Serena breaks up with Aaron and reunites with Dan, they discover they share a half brother. Her clothes don’t stray far from solid browns and blacks and grays—perhaps out of mourning for her stepfather, more likely out of mourning for her doomed second try with Dan.

Dan hopes they’ll attend Yale together, but on admission day (2.16), when they both get in, Serena secretly gives up her spot for Blair, who has been wait-listed. Her uniform is divided between her two loyalties: her collegiate plaid blazer much like Blair’s but its muted color palette more in line with Dan’s.

Later that day, she and Dan attend the opera with their parents, now dating each other, and see the world of kissing stepsiblings that awaits them. Serena, as for many of her most formal moments, wears a yellow gown. At the end of the episode, she stares wistfully at a photo of herself and Dan at cotillion, the days of her gold dress long gone. Dan, too, is drifting away, beginning an inappropriate friendship with Serena’s Shakespeare teacher, Miss Carr.

As Dan and Miss Carr grow closer, Serena starts to dress more like Dan and, for that matter, Miss Carr—gray and black solids and stripes, even a black cape-like coat. Miss Carr admires Dan’s writing, and Serena can’t help but worry about her own, to try harder to prove that she is serious and literary, even if it is only through her clothing. After all, as she tells Miss Carr, her mother never gifted her a notebook for her writing but “a Chanel wallet and a credit card to get [her] out of the house” (2.17). Serena is intellectually insecure, as anyone would be if they were constantly praised for things as ephemeral as beauty or sexiness; she’s been taught to express herself through buying and wearing clothes.

After Blair spreads a rumor that Dan is sleeping with Miss Carr, Serena provides a photo that confirms her story: Dan comforting a crying Miss Carr at a café. Miss Carr is fired, and Dan and Serena break up—turns out, Dan and Miss Carr hadn’t yet slept together. Serena attempts to apologize to Miss Carr, delivering a heartrending line: “You’re the only teacher who’s ever expressed any interest in me.” You have to wonder if that’s why Serena seeks out artists and writers, some outer intellectual validation that she is worthy of study, if not her own creation.

In the next episode, for example, Serena harbors a crush on Julian, the wunderkind director of her school’s production of The Age of Innocence. Her crush is reflected in her fashion choices: a skinny silver scarf to mimic his, paired with a black top and gray cardigan. She’s always trying to be a muse to creative men, to take on their talent instead of nurturing her own, and in the end, Julian barely knows who she is, calling her “Sabrina.” (Come season five, that name will take on even more significance.)

In episode twenty, Serena runs into her socialite friend Poppy, introduced in 2.5. When Poppy learns what Serena’s been up to since, she looks at her sadly: “A girl like you,” she says, “should be on the arm of a designer at the costume ball one day and yachting around the Maldives the next, not making up and breaking up with the same high school boy and feuding with your frenemy.”

Serena tries to end her “rut” by throwing Jenny the sweet sixteen she doesn’t want, all while dressed in a long-sleeve gray dress with sequined neckline, shiny gray tights, and a silver heart-and-dagger pendant. She may have a little sparkle around her neck, but she’s still in dejected gray, second-best silver—the party quickly turning from the social event of the season to a high school rager. 

Poppy invites Serena to Spain, and Serena agrees, eager to escape the wreckage of her party. At the airport, she meets Poppy’s boyfriend, Gabriel, for the first time—though he swears it’s the second. He says they met the night she was drugged by Georgina.

In this scene, Serena wears a yellow leather trench over a gray top and gold necklaces. Again, it’s not quite the gold dresses of season one, but it’s a step closer, a bright, attention-grabbing coat, not a drab gray dress. The coat speaks to the sad pattern of Serena’s life—that change will come not through her own will but through the desire of a man. By the time they return from Spain, Gabriel has moved from Poppy to Serena.

Gabriel is unlike Serena’s previous love interests—not an artist like Dan or Aaron or Julian but a businessman. Like her mother, who traded “rock stars for billionaires,” Serena is moving from creative types to moneyed types, from men who can validate herself to men who can validate her place in this world. Lily, of course, approves of Gabriel and even encourages her co-op board to invest in his company. Unlucky for them, Gabriel is a scammer, secretly in cahoots with Poppy. When Lily finds out, she insists on quietly paying everyone back rather than going to the police, and when Serena won’t follow her plan, she has her daughter arrested.

Serena’s outfits during these episodes shift slightly, favoring a slightly more rocker look—leather jackets and tanks and jeans. In fact, she looks a little more like Georgina in season one, appropriate considering the lie Gabriel told about meeting them that night.

Thanks to her arrest, Serena has become a paparazzi target (2.25). They follow her to her pre-graduation breakfast with Blair, Serena wearing a bright blue halter gown, later braiding a green tassel in her hair rather than wearing a mortarboard. Oh, Serena—never change.  

During the ceremony, Gossip Girl drops her present for the senior class—a label for each of the main characters. “After today,” she writes, Serena is “officially irrelevant.” There’s no greater insult for Serena—a girl who is always the center of attention, the muse; who was the original inspiration for the blog itself. Gossip Girl’s first post was about Serena, her white dress soaked on a field trip to the Intrepid.

Serena decides to figure out Gossip Girl’s identity, even invites the blogger to meet her at a bar later that evening. Instead, every senior, starting with Dan, shows up—Gossip Girl messaged them all. Serena wears a burgundy-sequined strapless dress, the color and sparkle not unlike the dress she wore the night she and Dan had sex for the first time, the night he gave her a copy of his story.

Dan dismisses her worries of irrelevance: “Without Serena van der Woodsen, who would I have dreamt about?” Serena smiles at this, her existence once again justified by Dan, by his fantasies and stories about her.

Reinvigorated, she packs for a summer in Europe before her freshman year at Brown, her outfit a spangly tank, jeans, and booties, a blue leather jacket thrown on as she waits for a taxi. There, she runs into Carter; he’s found what she’s long been looking for: her absent father.

[Look out for part two, covering seasons three and four, this evening.]