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How Gossip Girl Recreated the Met Gala for an Epic Farewell—Its Own Way

From a heritage Gee’s Bend quilt to cameos from fashion insiders, here’s how the Gossip Girl team said XOXO to its finale in its own (high) fashion. 
How 'Gossip Girl' Recreated the Met Gala for an Epic Farewell—Its Own Way
By Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max.

As impossible as it may sound, throughout its entire six-season run, the original Gossip Girl series never saw its characters attend the Met Gala. Considering the entire show was about fashion-obsessed, über-wealthy teenagers who dominated New York society, it’s almost absurd that Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf didn’t ever brawl at the city’s biggest and brightest event. I mean, they even met on the Met steps daily before school, for God’s sake! 

Blame boring old logistics for this narrative gap. 

Stephanie [Savage] and I wanted to do it the first time around. We tried—we started down the road and the road was good,” Gossip Girl reboot showrunner Josh Safran, who was also executive producer on the series’ original run, tells Vanity Fair. “The only problem became that, given the network schedule, we would have had to produce the Met Gala ourselves in February before it would happen in real life, and back when we made the original, the [gala] theme was not announced that early. We also didn’t necessarily have the budget back then to do it.”

Thankfully—and before its untimely demise—the Gossip Girl reboot on HBO Max provided both the opportunity and, importantly, the budget to make a Met Gala happen. Its second season was timed perfectly to coincide with the 2022 Met Gala themed “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” as our Constance Billard–St. Jude’s students were in their spring semester at that time. And for a show known to have every episode culminate in a Big Event, where bigger or better to end the season (and, again, the series) than at the Met Gala?

By Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max.

While the team briefly considered filming at the real deal, recreating the event made more sense from a production perspective, which is how a second set of Met steps, all decked out in the gala’s theme, was recreated on a soundstage at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. “We built a replica of the stairs to size,” Safran says. “It’s probably the most expensive set we ever built for the show—like, by far.”

There were no shortcuts here: It wasn’t possible to have real carpeting, because cameras needed to be able to move up and down, so set designers painted sisal to replicate the pattern seen in every shot from the 2022 event. And in the cameo department, Gossip Girl brought in fashion insiders like Vogue’s José Criales-Unzueta and Oscar de la Renta’s Fernando Garcia to play bit parts and better nail that inside-access feel, peppering the event with details that only those in the know would fully appreciate.

As is often the case for Gossip Girl—and definitely the case for the Met Gala, both real and imagined—the real star of the show is the fashion. Gossip Girl costume designer Eric Daman saw an opportunity to use the moment—often a straight-from-runway spotlight for many of the world’s largest, most established houses—to showcase an eclectic mix of all-American pieces, including some from lesser-known designers, archival pieces, vintage, and even some heritage handcrafts that nodded to the gala’s themes while staying true to the show’s characters. 

“I felt like we had such an incredible platform to put forward—be a little bit more inclusive and give visibility to younger designers,” he says.

Daman could have easily called in the majority of the wardrobe, considering many of the Gossip Girl stars have not only attended the Met Gala in real life but also carry ambassadorships with blue-chip European fashion brands like Dior and Chanel. Rather than lean on those connections, though, Daman dug deep, mining American fashion history and current up-and-coming talent alike to source the looks each of the characters would wear. 

“The magic of what I get to do is make characters; I’m not out to style Thomas [Doherty, who plays Max on the show] or get a Dior contract—I mean, sure, if Dior wants to give me a contract, sign me up,” he adds with a laugh. “But that’s not my job and what I am inspired by. What I’m here to do is to create the best Max moment on the Met carpet, which, to me, is not Dior.”

By Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max.

Instead, Daman worked directly with the Bode team to construct a custom suit for Max covered in one-of-a-kind antique crystals. Resident mean girl Monet de Haan (Savannah Smith) wears vintage Patrick Kelly, one of the first American designers to show in Paris, to go with what Daman dubs her “’90s Naomi Campbell” vibes. In a nod to actor Evan Mock’s own Hawaiian upbringing, Daman tapped The Consistency Project for his character, Aki Menzies, who reworked some secondhand pieces into a suit that was then custom-dyed to match Mock’s pink hair. 

Sadly, Daman was mere days late to an auction on a ’60s couture Ann Lowe gown that would’ve been perfect for Audrey Hope (Emily Alyn Lind); Lowe’s work was represented in the “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” exhibition and would’ve fit in with Audrey’s Jackie Onassis inspiration. Instead, they went with Carolina Herrera, who also dressed Jackie O and her jet-set friends. 

Garcia’s cameo is more than just set dressing. He and his design partner, Laura Kim, have collaborated with Daman in the past, and in a pivotal moment, Garcia meets Luna La (Zión Moreno), wearing a design from Monse, and Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander) wearing a crystal-covered gown from his Oscar de la Renta—which, it should be noted, she wore before Taylor Swift hit the 2022 VMA red carpet in it.

By Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max.

“The minute I saw that dress, I just knew that it was such a special, one-of-a-kind [piece]—what Julien Calloway would wear to the Met,” he says. “No one had actually worn it yet; it is a very difficult dress to wear. It is just layers and layers of crystal—it is very heavy.”

There was a whole team dedicated to taking the dress on and off of Alexander during filming to  keep her comfortable, “carrying it around like a baby wrapped in tissue paper,” Daman says. It even had its own tent to keep it pristine between takes.

Even costumes for the extras were chosen with care: Olivia LaTronica, an assistant costume designer on the show, reached out to students at the Fashion Institute of Technology for their year-end look books. Daman pulled pieces from several—Larglinda Ilazi, Wenwen Lei, Maggie Tao, Sean Patrick, Yimeng Zhao, Sophia Ho, Vicky Zhang, and Charles Li—to appear in the background. 

By Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max.

“To be able to work with an American school and all these incredible young designers—their show-stopping, Met-worthy designs—I’m very grateful,” Daman says.

But some of the most impressive pieces in the episode don’t come from a design house at all; they were masterminded in the show’s costume department and created from scratch. Take, for example, the maxi skirt worn by Shan Barnes (Grace Duah): Because her character fancies herself a “disrupter,” Daman wanted her look to call out the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. They found an image of the factory that would work on a 48-inch screen print—“quite a process” to get one that both cleared legal and was high enough quality, according to Daman—and then had gems sewn around it in an orange flame pattern. The look is finished with styling in a nod to the Suffragettes, with a shirtwaist and hat.

“That felt like a very important moment and message, and it also felt right for who Shan is,” Daman says.

The centerpiece of the episode, both from a fashion and plot perspective, is the gown worn by Zoya Lott (Whitney Peak). It’s clearly a callback to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2021 headline-making Met Gala dress, but instead of “Tax the Rich” across the back, it has an apron featuring “I am Gossip Girl” in cross-stitch. Underneath is a voluminous skirt made up of one 12-by-10-foot quilt by the historic Gee’s Bend group, kept completely in one piece.

“Our tailor, Raven [Jakubowski], she quilts and has much respect for that kind of artistry. She did not want to cut into someone else’s craft,” Daman explains. “We worked together and she came up with this incredible way of draping it and sewing it together so that she did not have to cut into it. She did an incredible job—I was really blown away by how she could manipulate the quilting in a way that drapes beautifully.”

So if this is the last time our Gossip Girl characters all come together to scheme and stir up scandal at a single event—and certainly, considering the current streaming climate, it seems that way—at least they went out with a bang: crashing the Met Gala red carpet.

“That is the thing that I will carry with me my entire life, is how much fun it is to have now done 143 episodes where everybody converges at the same event,” Safran says. “That’s the special sauce of Gossip Girl—it’s the greatest thing ever.”