Blake Lively's Preserve Is Gone With the Wind, Y'all

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Sorry, gals, but soon you’ll have one less place to shop for very expensive “bohemian” skirts to wear to Coachella. Preserve is done—for now, anyway.

Vogue reports that Blake Lively will be shutting the site down October 9.

“We have an incredible team of people who do beautiful work, but we launched the site before it was ready, and it never caught up to its original mission: It’s not making a difference in people’s lives, whether superficially or in a meaningful way,” she says, on the phone from New York. “And that’s the whole reason I started this company, not just to fluff myself, like, ‘I’m a celebrity! People will care what I have to say!’ It was so never meant to be that, and that kind of became the crutch because it was already up and already running, and it’s hard to build a brand when you’re running full steam ahead—how do you catch up?”

Don’t worry, though—Lively plans to “rebuild, rebrand, and eventually reveal—on her own timeline—what her project was always meant to be,” Vogue assures us. And what’s that, again? “Our goal has always been to touch millennials through storytelling, and the idea is to create a shoppable lifestyle.” Maybe they should be aiming for a vibe that’s less fake Depression-era South/bougie Carter Family cooption, more Minority Report advertising-rich dystopia.

“I’m going to take this hit, and the only way I can prove all the negative reactions wrong is to come back with a plan that will rock people,” she said. In the meantime: “I’ve asked my assistant to just play ‘Shake It Off’ on a loop—it feels really good to listen to it on a loop!”

Preserve 1.0 will live on, however, by its being cited every time somebody writes an essay or dissertation about the fact that Americans are still so historically ignorant as to throw around the term “Southern Belle” like it’s nothing more than a synonym for somebody who serves healthy organic snacks on her wraparound porch. RIP: “Hoop skirts are replaced by flared and pleated A-lines; oversized straw toppers are transformed into wide-brimmed floppy hats and wool fedoras.”

At least we’ve still got Draper James. (For now, anyway.)


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