Custom Design

Time for a seriously awesome giveaway.

PurseBlog has teamed up with the wonderful folks of Notting Hill Design of West London to give our readers the chance to win a one-of-a-kind bag. We have given away some really cool bags and accessories over the years, but this tops it all.

The bag to win this time is the actual Turquoise Python Westbourne that was worn by no other than Leighton Meester during the filming of the TV hit show Gossip Girl! It is not another bag from the running production, this is it, the very bag that has been eternalized on film in Gossip Girl. It even came to PB headquarters in a box straight from the production company!

And with only a little bit of effort and luck, it may be yours in about a month’s time…!

Retail on this beautiful exotic is £1,895 (~$2,900).

How do I win it?

1. First of all, become a fan of our Facebook fan page. Or Like it, as they now call it.

2. Tell us on our Facebook wall why it is that you’d like to win this bag. You must start the sentence with “I want to win this Notting Hill Design bag because…” and tell us how much and why you would love to own this bag.

A winner will be randomly chosen from the entries, the giveaway will run until May 23rd, 11:59pm EST. Good luck!

Please also show the wonderful folks at Notting Hill Designs some love and like their Facebook page, too!

Original post by Vlad Dusil

As much as I love the shape of the Notting Hill Westbourne, it is the rich saturation of colors that has me ga-ga for the brand. To be honest, it is both aspects. The structured shape of the Westbourne is typically not one I am drawn to, yet the feminine and streamlined design is perfectly put together. Why I really love this bag is that it is perfect for dressing up but can still be worn dressed down. And for me, having a more elegant bag in my wardrobe that I can still wear with jeans is a homerun.

For Spring 2010 I could not pass up sharing the colors that Notting Hill has available in the Westbourne.

There is Lilac Python, Cream Matte Crocodile, Sunset Orange Glossy Python, and Pink Python. Each color catches my attention brilliantly. It is as if these Notting Hill bags are in a color league of their own. While the color is rich and saturated, it does not look overdone or too powerful. There is an element of toned-down to a vamped up color scheme that is anything but bland. Sounds like an oxymoron, but these bags are working it!

I have felt the python skin Notting Hill Design uses in person and it is rich and smooth, lacking any sign of light and flaky like some other skins we see. I am sure the matte crocodile is just as luscious as it looks as well. This fabulous foursome leaves an option for everyone. The croc version is around $14,000 and python is around $2,650 via Notting Hill Design Online.

Which color Westbourne do you prefer?

Original post by Megs Mahoney Dusil

Oh how I adore Halloween. I’d gladly trade Thanksgiving every year for Halloween Part Two, but since I’m not the person that gets to decide such things, I merely try to enjoy it as much as I can while it’s here.

And that’s what Gossip Girl did last night – or tried to do, anyway. I was a little disappointed that the writers didn’t make more out of the metaphorical idea of wearing masks and the need to be appear something other than what we actually are – they’re usually all over that kind of stuff like white on rice. They did give a small nod to the idea that Jenny wears her high school crown uneasily, and behold, the actor that plays Eric not only isn’t dead in a ditch somewhere, but he still has the ability to recite lines. Could have fooled me.

But mostly, Halloween on the Upper East Side just meant we got sparkly dresses and a reason to have a party. And I’m never opposed to a party Or a sparkly dress, for that matter.

When we left off last week, everyone had been betrayed. Blair sold out Chuck, Nate sold out Serena and she sold him out right back, Vanessa sold out Olivia and Dan and utterly failed at it, because she’s Vanessa. Everyone was still pissed at everyone else, except we don’t know how anyone felt about Vanessa since she apparently crawled into a shame hole somewhere and stayed there for the whole episode. Let’s hope she stays for the season.

Blair and Chuck have nominally made up, but Chuck is doing the teenage girl thing where he accepts Blair’s apology to her face and then continues to seethe and undermine her privately, on his own time. Which, you know, he’s a busy man. He’s got a new hotel that’s at woefully low occupancy heading up to the holidays, and he’s got to do something about that, lest he become failure (but even if he did become a failure, he’d still be a billionaire, so he’d still be doing better than basically everyone else on the planet).

So he’s going to open a club, but he’s going to do it without Blair, because he’s still silently punishing her for making him kiss that dude. I kind of don’t blame him. And he’s going to enlist Serena for help, because he needs controversy and famous people in order to make the club, and by association, the hotel, super popular and those things happen to be Serena’s specialty (really, it’s perfect that she’s a publicist now). But Serena and Blair are besties (until the end of the episode at least), so Blair finds out about the whole thing in a half-baked speakerphone plot that Chuck would have seen right through, were these real people that weren’t reading from scripts.

But before we get too far into that, let’s deal with the Jenny issue. She’s still nominally the Queen Bee, but she claims to be playing the part only so that a less benevolent dictator doesn’t move in to the potential power vacuum. But Eric’s little twink boyfriend, Jonathan or Jeremy or whatever his unimportant name is, thinks that that’s just bananas, and that he’s going to go sit a higher than Jenny on the Met steps, thereby forcing her into some sort of step power struggle in order to preserve her position of dominance in front of her minions. As Eric so aptly pointed out, it’s hard to lead if no one thinks they have to follow, and the whole thing somehow ends with Eric getting a parfait dumped on his head. Parfait always reminds me of Shrek. Maybe I’m the only one.

When that incident comes to light, Jenny’s new mommy Lily sits her down and explains some hard truths about being a queen and sympathizes a little too much for a mom that just had her recently suicidal, newly out of the closet son assaulted with a girly dairy product. The only punishment that she manages to meter out to Jenny is that she’s required to take her new stepbrother with her to Chuck’s boozy, star-studded club opening. Not exactly punishment, since he was her best gay up until earlier that day.

So yeah, about that party. Chuck decides he’s going to open the club like a day before he plans to have this swanky, 20s-themed debut Halloween party, and the only problem is the liquor license. Those things take forever to get – months. But Chuck is powerful, so he believes that he can rush the application, and sure enough he gets it in the nick of time. Or so he thinks. Actually, Blair has found out about the whole thing and plans to show her love for him by contacting Uncle Jack Bass to move things along. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to believe that Jack can get the license any more quickly than Chuck can, since you’d think that Chuck would be at least as well-connected, but he supposedly comes through for Blair and gets the license. She can’t tell Chuck, though, because she’s still not supposed to know that the club is opening.

Meanwhile, Serena has some machinations of her own at hand. Olivia and Dan are considering the possibility of doing the nasty for the first time (shenanigans – if they were real people, they already would have. Long ago), and Olivia gets photographed by the paparazzi while picking up some freebie condoms at the NYU health center. You’d think she’d know better, but I guess her lust for Dan’s newly muscled body has her all flustered.

But Dan’s distracted by something different – Olivia’s Twilight-esque film work with her ex-boyfriend is making him highly uncomfortable. She claims it was a fake relationship, but it wasn’t, and her publicist/Serena’s boss wants them to continue to appear together in public in order to keep the dude’s career afloat.

As you can guess, this all ties together at Chuck’s club opening. He had already found out that Blair had gone to Jack for help and barred her from coming to the party as a result (he also managed to get Serena on his side). But that liquor license that she procured? Well, it’s a fake because Jack and Chuck still hate each other and he wouldn’t honestly help out with the club opening, and Jack sent her flowers right before the club opening that included a message to that effect. As a result, she has to show up and spill the beans to Chuck about the impending bust that Jack was undoubtedly planning. And Chuck puts on the angry face with Blair for a moment, but then they realize that they have a great opportunity to join forces and grab some publicity by calling the cops themselves to bust the party. Which is a beautiful resolution to all of this, really – their compatibility always has been based on their mutual underhandedness.

But before the bust can happen, some other drama has to go down. Jenny has to take Eric to the party, and Eric’s boyfriend (who started all this trouble in the first place by trying to upset the high school power structure) comes too and he gets egged by the minions outside. I’m having a problem feeling particularly sorry for him, however, and I think that Eric needs to break up with him and explore his options. He’s a young, rich gay man in the city! The possibilities are endless! And the whole incident just makes him madder at Jenny (she did, after all plan it), meanwhile making her more sure that she needs to be more queenly. That’ll go well, I’m sure.

And then there’s the little matter of Dan and Olivia – Serena lies to her boss about why she was keeping the party a secret and has her fly in Olivia’s ex to have them reunite in front of the paparazzi. Dan shows up anyway and things get a little weird and awkward in the way that only old boyfriend/new boyfriend scenarios can be, but Serena saves the day with one of her strongest skills – making out with Olivia’s old boyfriend in front of photographers in order to create new buzz for both Olivia and her ex. Plus, she did it in an inappropriately short, tight, shiny dress! She’s really gifted at the whole publicity thing.

But as we all knew they would, the cops show and kick everyone out into the street in their Roaring 20s finery, creating a paparazzi feeding frenzy and giving all of these people exactly what they want – more attention. Chuck and Blair are back and his club is front-page news, Dan and Olivia are now publicly a couple (and now they’re boning!), and Serena gets to keep her publicity job as long as she keeps publicly kissing that dude.

Oh, but there is one issue – in a bit of a blast from the past, Blair and Serena are now feuding over Serena’s refusal to take Blair’s side in the Jack Bass fiasco and her disinterest in quitting her job to become the club’s publicist. It seems to somehow result in Blair’s face in a cake next week, which I absolutely cannot wait to see.

Original post by Amanda Mull

We all knew it couldn’t last for long.

When we left our Upper East Siders on Monday prior, truth was the word of the day. Secrets had been revealed, acceptance and forgiveness had been doled out in appropriate amounts, and everyone heaved a collective sigh of relief. But these people love drama more than middle school girls do, and the quickest route to drama is through deception.

In short, everyone started lying again, and lying beget the necessity for our newly minted college students to sell each other out. Even Vanessa tried her hand at it, which she really shouldn’t, because she’s not dastardly. And Nate failed too, because he is an imbecile. But it was Blair’s failure that might cost her the most of all.

My expectations were low when the whole shindig started with Nate and Serena hatching a plan. I don’t trust that those two have the combined intellectual power to make sure that they remember their potty training, let alone to pull off a brilliant caper. Blair and Chuck, they’re not. Good thing that the caper wasn’t particularly brilliant.

In fact, the entire thing was suitably convoluted. Carter, cad extraordinaire, has been whisked off to a Texas oil rig by the Buckley family goons to perform what is basically an epic version of washing the dishes when you can’t afford the check for dinner. They’re going to force him into indentured servitude until he pays back half a million dollars in gambling debts that they had made disappear following his engagement to Bree’s sister, and somehow the best way to solve this problem is to play poker.

Yep, poker. Bree’s brother plays clandestine, illegal poker in some kind of industrial facility (why not in a swanky hotel suite? He’s rich. Take a page from Chuck Bass’s playbook, dude) and the buy in is $25,000, and Nate thinks it’s a brilliant idea to set Serena up to play and then raise the stakes high enough to win back Carter’s freedom. Nate tells Serena that it’ll all be okay since Bree got tipsy one night and told him all of her brother’s “tells,” which makes no sense, why would they talk about that? Nate also told Serena that she had to play because Bree’s brother hated him and would never let him play, and then proceeded to sit right behind her the entire time and help her. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

When Serena is predictably terrible at poker (since she is pretty and breast-y and long-legged but, ultimately, an idiot) and loses all of the money that they were playing with, Nate offers up a little bit of political blackmail in order to raise the stakes. See, his cousin Tripp is now running for Congress, and the Buckleys are scheming to make sure he doesn’t get elected. Nate has a photo on his phone of his cousin taking what looks like a bong hit at his bachelor party, and Nate offers to bet it against Carter’s freedom. Which is silly, since Carter isn’t in jail, if he’s really being imprisoned then he should just call the police.

Serena had no idea that Nate was going to do any of this, and she’s super nervous and then, naturally, loses the picture and Carter’s freedom. Because she doesn’t know how to play poker, and Nate doesn’t actually know any of the guy’s tells after all. You see, it was all a nefarious scheme. Set Serena up to lose the picture in the name of winning back her boyfriend, the Buckleys release the picture to the media, and then the Vanderbilts release the REAL version of the photo (which only shows Tripp holding a beer) to make the Buckleys look like lying, deceitful political opportunists that doctored a photo in order to steal an election. Ta-da.

Is it just me, or is that whole process probably too complicated for Nate to understand in writing, let alone carry out in reality? And he isn’t successful at it because Serena overhears him spill the beans on the phone, and she tips off the Buckleys and allows them to save political face in exchange for Carter’s freedom. But he doesn’t want her gosh-darn charity, he wants to work off his douchebaggery on an oil rig, so he’s mad at her. Well, he’s not really mad at her. He’s projecting his own self-loathing ON to her, and there’s a distinction there.

So Nate’s mad at Serena, Serena’s mad at Nate, and Carter is mad at Serena (and presumably also Nate, but who knows/cares?). Moving on to the real plot.

It’s Freshman Parents’ Weekend Banquet Dinner Highland Fling Whatever at NYU which means, you guessed it, another reason to get a big portion of the cast together and for hijinks to ensue. I call shenanigans on the entire concept of getting all of the freshman class and their parents together at one time in the first place, and also on the idea that it’s an event that anyone that goes to NYU would actually clear an evening to attend.

And not only did they do just that, but Blair and Vanessa fought bitterly over who would be making the toast to kick off the evening. An evening which, in reality, only the kids that were already filling out grad school applications and hoping to impress faculty would deign to attend. And for some reason, NYU has decided to worship at the altar of Vanessa (which would never really happen – quasi-charitable, self-righteous, neo-hippie douchebags are a dime a dozen at a school like that) and offer her the opportunity to give the toast. Blair volunteers herself for the job, but no one at NYU likes Blair, including the faculty and staff, so they don’t take her up on it.

But then Fake Hannah Montana throws a wrench into the works. She’s back from Japan and slobbering all over Dan again, and he insists that she come to the Freshman Barn Dance and Yodeling Contest or whatever and meet his parents. Since she’s famous and all, she was offered the toast-making honors before Vanessa was contacted, and now that she’s attending the dinner she reconsiders and accepts the gig, unwittingly ousting Vanessa.

What happened after that is almost too convoluted to retell, but I’ll give it a shot: Blair makes another grab for the toast, she gets denied, she tells Vanessa that Olivia has yanked it out from under her. Vanessa tells Olivia that Dan doesn’t really want her to meet his parents and she shouldn’t go to the dinner, Vanessa tells Dan that Olivia doesn’t want to meet his parents and he should have alone time with her instead. Blair cons Chuck into kissing the Freshman Toasting Liason or whatever, who is a dude, in order to secure her spot as the toast-maker. So, Blair wins. For now.

But, hark, what is this! Vanessa commandeers a microphone before the shindig starts and is able to broadcast Blair saying a bunch of nasty, Blair-ish things about NYU people to everyone at the banquet, but that doesn’t mean Vanessa wins. She still loses. First, because she’s Vanessa, and second, because her pretentious a-hole of a mom hears her talking smack about how she wishes Rufus and Lily were her parents, and third, because Dan and Olivia both figure out her scheme and get mad at her for almost ruining their relationship. One can only hope that Vanessa will be so distraught by all of these happenings that she’ll flee the city forever, never to return.

But she’s not the only one reeling from the experience. Chuck was at the dinner, surprise surprise, and heard what Blair said about duping him into being part of her scheme under the guise of a sex game. And he’s mad, understandably, because homosexual makeouts in public are probably not his main form of casual entertainment, and if he’s going to do it, then he better have all the facts!

So by the end of the episode, everyone hates Blair, everyone hates Vanessa, and the former rivals find themselves sitting sadly together at a table in that coffee shop that everyone just happens to go to, staring at their croissants and feeling sorry for themselves. Fret not, little ladies – everything will change next week. It always does.

Original post by Amanda Mull

I feel like our little Gossip Girl writers are growing up. For the second (or third?) week in a row, we’ve had a theme. A theme and some narrative symmetry! It’s almost like this is a real TV show that we’re watching here!

In last night’s episode, everyone came clean. It was like a confessional up in this piece, for real. Scott confessed to Rufus and Lily (via Georgina), Lily confessed to Rufus, Vanessa confessed to Dan, Carter confessed to Serena, and Bree confessed to Nate (well, she was sort of…found out. But she came clean. Whatev).

Shall the truth set our Upper East Siders free? Probs not, they’ll all just start lying again next week. If they don’t lie, we don’t have a show. But let’s enjoy a brief moment of honesty and transparency, shall we?

So we started the episode with Rufus and Lily hating each other and we ended it with them getting married by Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. I’m not really sure how that happened, but Kim Gordon? Eff yes.

The reason that Lily and Rufus were hating each other was because of little old Serena. You see, Lily blames Rufus for not forcing Serena to go to Brown while she was gone with CeCe, and Rufus was mad that Lily wasn’t being more understanding about the whole no college thing. Lily may seem justified in her irritation, but let’s check Rufus’s parenting track record: he let his daughter drop out of high school for a fashion internship. He let said daughter run away and live in a gross Lower East Side apartment with a crazy model and her Cobrasnake-wannabe boyfriend, who took half-clothed pictures of her. He let her cut her hair into a slightly punk, bleach-blond mullet. This man is obviously not to be trusted with minors, Lily should have seen this coming a mile away. Which is not to say that Lily has done any better in the past.

But they were going to call the whole thing off, and Rufus even went so far as to spend the night in his old Brooklyn loft, which we’re all apparently supposed to believe is a tenement where he eats beans out of a can and sings hobo songs or something, instead of being kind of boho and fabulous. But of course, Lily and Rufus aren’t the only ones with relationship problems. So before we can solve theirs, we have to hear about everyone else’s.

Olivia is off on an Asian press tour, and that means it’s time for Georgina to make her psycho-triumphant return. As anyone that’s ever dated a certifiable crazyperson knows, you can’t just break up with them. They won’t let you. So she’s been calling, texting, and sending e-cards (who sends e-cards??), and Dan’s been using Vanessa’s iChat name so that Georgina won’t see him when he gets on to talk to Olivia. There’s a life lesson here: don’t sleep with crazy people. It may seem like it will be fun at the time, and it usually is, but unless you plan to kill them like a praying mantis immediately afterward, it’s not worth the world of pain they’re going to put you in later.

Case in point: Georgina has dirt on Scott, which means she has dirt on Vanessa. She ambushes her at a coffee shop to get the lowdown on what (who?) Dan was doing while she was scheming in Boston, and when she finds out that Dan is now dating Fake Hannah Montana, she uses her information about Dan’s brother in order to blackmail Vanessa into helping her. And maybe it was because she’s blinded by love (or psychosis), but it seemed like her plan was fairly weak – have Vanessa tell Dan that Fake Hannah Montana is dating Orlando Bloom? Srsly? You can do better, Georgie. Which she did. Later.

And then, good ol’ Carter and Serena. See, Carter’s got secrets. When you spend the entirety of your adult life being a cad, that’s bound to happen. It seems to me that no one should be surprised by his past anymore but, well, Serena’s not that bright. Cute, nice rack, snappy dresser, but not that bright. And anyway, being a “changed” person doesn’t mean that you can erase all the craptacular stuff you’ve done in the past. Because it takes one to know one, Chuck realizes that there’s more than a common Sea Island vacation history between Bree and Carter while they’re having a dim sum double date and confronts her about it in the kitchen.

Sure enough, Bree’s sister(?) almost married Carter, but he left her at the altar after her parents bailed out his gambling debts, which left the Buckleys understandably irritated with him. And they’re from Texas so, you know, don’t mess with them. And don’t mess with Chuck, either: he found himself again offering Carter (that’s just a douchey name, isn’t it?) a plane ticket to leave everyone alone or he would have to own up to Serena in front of Bree at Lily and Rufus’s wedding.

Oh yeah, the wedding! At some point, instead of figuring out their issues, Lily and Rufus just decided to say “eff it” and get married on the quick. At the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens! Cute, right? They set up the whole thing on the fly, and since Lily is ridiculously well-connected, that’s really not that hard to imagine. Friends and money make things easy, never forget it. Lily even had Jenny make her a dress, which was kind of sweet, but also not really believable for Lily’s character – she would have called the gals at Marchesa and had some alternative wedding options delivered to the apartment, of course.

But the wedding gives us another opportunity to get all the kids together and for hijinks to ensue, which is the writers’ challenge every epside: getting a bunch of people with different lives and social schedules to the same event at the same time so that things can hit the fan. Blair, Chuck, Nate, Bree, Carter, Serena, Dan, they’re all there. And then Georgina shows up! Despite being specifically not invited and despite Dan’s best attempt to fool her into believing that Vanessa didn’t already spill the beans on her insanity (and on his brother) to him. You can’t hustle a hustler, so she doesn’t buy the “let’s get back together, but don’t come to my dad’s wedding” line and decides to show up with Scott and make a scene anyway.

But because this is Gossip Girl, a scene was already ensuing when she and the bastard child arrived. Carter had decided to grow a pair, show up, and come clean to Serena about his wicked ways in the past. She got upset, but got un-upset later, but it was too late because Carter was already being whisked away in a limo by the Buckley family goons. But the real scene was Lily and Rufus in the process of calling the whole thing off because, well, they just don’t agree on anything. And like the totally creepy and awkward stalker he is, Scott decided to walk up right in the middle of all of that, despite the fact that he’s never so much as met Lily before. And because she’s wealthy and used to getting her way, she went all BISH PLZ on him, and he ran off.

Cue Georgina, coming up at just the right time, as everyone was gathering to see what the Lily/Rufus foofaraw was about. So she dropped the illegitimate child bomb and wandered off to help herself to a plate of food from the buffet while Lily and Rufus hoofed it to Chinatown to stop Scott from getting on a bus back to Boston. I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t have just, ya know, flown there. With Lily’s vast fortune. But whatever. Chinatown!

Not only did they stop Scott, but they managed to work out all of their marriage woes right there on the sidewalk, with the scent of Peking duck wafting through the air, and they decided to get married anyway! That night, by Kim Gordon, and then Sonic Youth was their wedding band. Not too bad for the second try at a quickie wedding in a single day, if you ask me. And not only that, but it set the stage for what might be the end of the annoying Bree Buckley storyline – Nate got wise to the fact that Bree was just using him to find Carter, and I was kind of shocked that Nate has the rational capabilities to deduce such things. Maybe Blair clued him in. And by maybe, I mean yes, that’s absolutely what happened.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part, my friends, was what happened to Georgina. After trying to ruin the wedding, she went to drink alone, of course. There, she was whisked away to God knows where by none other than Dorota’s doorman boyfriend, as Miss Blair’s maid looked on approvingly. He was posing as a Belarussian prince. How do they think of this stuff? And when do we get to see more Dorota? I need more of her in my life. And what is he going to do with Georgian? Fly to Eastern Europe and ditch her there? One can only hope.

Original post by Amanda Mull

I feel like our little Gossip Girl writers are growing up. For the second (or third?) week in a row, we’ve had a theme. A theme and some narrative symmetry! It’s almost like this is a real TV show that we’re watching here!

In last night’s episode, everyone came clean. It was like a confessional up in this piece, for real. Scott confessed to Rufus and Lily (via Georgina), Lily confessed to Rufus, Vanessa confessed to Dan, Carter confessed to Serena, and Bree confessed to Nate (well, she was sort of…found out. But she came clean. Whatev).

Shall the truth set our Upper East Siders free? Probs not, they’ll all just start lying again next week. If they don’t lie, we don’t have a show. But let’s enjoy a brief moment of honesty and transparency, shall we?

So we started the episode with Rufus and Lily hating each other and we ended it with them getting married by Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. I’m not really sure how that happened, but Kim Gordon? Eff yes.

The reason that Lily and Rufus were hating each other was because of little old Serena. You see, Lily blames Rufus for not forcing Serena to go to Brown while she was gone with CeCe, and Rufus was mad that Lily wasn’t being more understanding about the whole no college thing. Lily may seem justified in her irritation, but let’s check Rufus’s parenting track record: he let his daughter drop out of high school for a fashion internship. He let said daughter run away and live in a gross Lower East Side apartment with a crazy model and her Cobrasnake-wannabe boyfriend, who took half-clothed pictures of her. He let her cut her hair into a slightly punk, bleach-blond mullet. This man is obviously not to be trusted with minors, Lily should have seen this coming a mile away. Which is not to say that Lily has done any better in the past.

But they were going to call the whole thing off, and Rufus even went so far as to spend the night in his old Brooklyn loft, which we’re all apparently supposed to believe is a tenement where he eats beans out of a can and sings hobo songs or something, instead of being kind of boho and fabulous. But of course, Lily and Rufus aren’t the only ones with relationship problems. So before we can solve theirs, we have to hear about everyone else’s.

Olivia is off on an Asian press tour, and that means it’s time for Georgina to make her psycho-triumphant return. As anyone that’s ever dated a certifiable crazyperson knows, you can’t just break up with them. They won’t let you. So she’s been calling, texting, and sending e-cards (who sends e-cards??), and Dan’s been using Vanessa’s iChat name so that Georgina won’t see him when he gets on to talk to Olivia. There’s a life lesson here: don’t sleep with crazy people. It may seem like it will be fun at the time, and it usually is, but unless you plan to kill them like a praying mantis immediately afterward, it’s not worth the world of pain they’re going to put you in later.

Case in point: Georgina has dirt on Scott, which means she has dirt on Vanessa. She ambushes her at a coffee shop to get the lowdown on what (who?) Dan was doing while she was scheming in Boston, and when she finds out that Dan is now dating Fake Hannah Montana, she uses her information about Dan’s brother in order to blackmail Vanessa into helping her. And maybe it was because she’s blinded by love (or psychosis), but it seemed like her plan was fairly weak – have Vanessa tell Dan that Fake Hannah Montana is dating Orlando Bloom? Srsly? You can do better, Georgie. Which she did. Later.

And then, good ol’ Carter and Serena. See, Carter’s got secrets. When you spend the entirety of your adult life being a cad, that’s bound to happen. It seems to me that no one should be surprised by his past anymore but, well, Serena’s not that bright. Cute, nice rack, snappy dresser, but not that bright. And anyway, being a “changed” person doesn’t mean that you can erase all the craptacular stuff you’ve done in the past. Because it takes one to know one, Chuck realizes that there’s more than a common Sea Island vacation history between Bree and Carter while they’re having a dim sum double date and confronts her about it in the kitchen.

Sure enough, Bree’s sister(?) almost married Carter, but he left her at the altar after her parents bailed out his gambling debts, which left the Buckleys understandably irritated with him. And they’re from Texas so, you know, don’t mess with them. And don’t mess with Chuck, either: he found himself again offering Carter (that’s just a douchey name, isn’t it?) a plane ticket to leave everyone alone or he would have to own up to Serena in front of Bree at Lily and Rufus’s wedding.

Oh yeah, the wedding! At some point, instead of figuring out their issues, Lily and Rufus just decided to say “eff it” and get married on the quick. At the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens! Cute, right? They set up the whole thing on the fly, and since Lily is ridiculously well-connected, that’s really not that hard to imagine. Friends and money make things easy, never forget it. Lily even had Jenny make her a dress, which was kind of sweet, but also not really believable for Lily’s character – she would have called the gals at Marchesa and had some alternative wedding options delivered to the apartment, of course.

But the wedding gives us another opportunity to get all the kids together and for hijinks to ensue, which is the writers’ challenge every epside: getting a bunch of people with different lives and social schedules to the same event at the same time so that things can hit the fan. Blair, Chuck, Nate, Bree, Carter, Serena, Dan, they’re all there. And then Georgina shows up! Despite being specifically not invited and despite Dan’s best attempt to fool her into believing that Vanessa didn’t already spill the beans on her insanity (and on his brother) to him. You can’t hustle a hustler, so she doesn’t buy the “let’s get back together, but don’t come to my dad’s wedding” line and decides to show up with Scott and make a scene anyway.

But because this is Gossip Girl, a scene was already ensuing when she and the bastard child arrived. Carter had decided to grow a pair, show up, and come clean to Serena about his wicked ways in the past. She got upset, but got un-upset later, but it was too late because Carter was already being whisked away in a limo by the Buckley family goons. But the real scene was Lily and Rufus in the process of calling the whole thing off because, well, they just don’t agree on anything. And like the totally creepy and awkward stalker he is, Scott decided to walk up right in the middle of all of that, despite the fact that he’s never so much as met Lily before. And because she’s wealthy and used to getting her way, she went all BISH PLZ on him, and he ran off.

Cue Georgina, coming up at just the right time, as everyone was gathering to see what the Lily/Rufus foofaraw was about. So she dropped the illegitimate child bomb and wandered off to help herself to a plate of food from the buffet while Lily and Rufus hoofed it to Chinatown to stop Scott from getting on a bus back to Boston. I mean, it’s not like they couldn’t have just, ya know, flown there. With Lily’s vast fortune. But whatever. Chinatown!

Not only did they stop Scott, but they managed to work out all of their marriage woes right there on the sidewalk, with the scent of Peking duck wafting through the air, and they decided to get married anyway! That night, by Kim Gordon, and then Sonic Youth was their wedding band. Not too bad for the second try at a quickie wedding in a single day, if you ask me. And not only that, but it set the stage for what might be the end of the annoying Bree Buckley storyline – Nate got wise to the fact that Bree was just using him to find Carter, and I was kind of shocked that Nate has the rational capabilities to deduce such things. Maybe Blair clued him in. And by maybe, I mean yes, that’s absolutely what happened.

But that wasn’t the best part. The best part, my friends, was what happened to Georgina. After trying to ruin the wedding, she went to drink alone, of course. There, she was whisked away to God knows where by none other than Dorota’s doorman boyfriend, as Miss Blair’s maid looked on approvingly. He was posing as a Belarussian prince. How do they think of this stuff? And when do we get to see more Dorota? I need more of her in my life. And what is he going to do with Georgina? Fly to Eastern Europe and ditch her there? One can only hope.

Original post by Amanda Mull

Swoon.

Is it just me, or was last night’s episode GREAT?

All in one hour of television, we got a crazy Tyra Banks cameo, the return of the “I’m Chuck Bass” line, references to Heart of Darkness, Jean Renoir’s World War II classic The Grand Illusion, and Dumbo, and a closing song so good that it just made me download Passion Pit’s entire album on iTunes.

See, Gossip Girl? This is what you can be if you really put your mind to it.

In addition to crazypants Tyra, we also got the introduction of a story arc starring Hilary Duff. She’s Olivia, an actress hitting it big just as she attempts to start a “normal life” at NYU. And, what a coincidence, she’s Vanessa’s roommate! Despite the fact that classes have already started and everyone had already moved in weeks ago. Right.

Anyway, Dan meets this Olivia person on the street (she spots him a buck fifty for coffee – as they say, you can take the boy out of Brookyln, but you can’t take the Brooklyn out of the boy…) and when she realizes that Dan has no idea who she is (which I don’t buy – any hipster worth his American Apparel hoodie would have a deep and ironic love for the crappy vampire flicks she’s said to have starred in up to that point), she decides to play Hannah Montana and tell him that her name is Kate and she’s just a regular NYU freshman from down the Jersey Turnpike, trying to navigate her new life in the big city. Right.

Well, since Dan just lost his most recent booty call to psychosis, he can’t help but be smitten after a quick walk around the block with this new girl. Yet he doesn’t ask for her number, which is never explained, and he doesn’t know she’s Vanessa’s roommate yet. Serendipitously, not only does he run in to her later, but he does so in a way that means not only does Nate get called up from the DL to interact with the group, but he gets to act SMART! Like he understands the plot and all the big words that people are using! Because of course, Nate doesn’t read or anything, so all he does is watch DVDs and play with his manbangs, and he knows exactly who Fake Hannah Montana is, but doesn’t reveal it to Dan, who promptly asks her on a date.

Meanwhile, in another part of town with nicer interiors, Blair is trying to re-infiltrate Constance Billard since no one at NYU likes her. Which is troublesome, since she left Jenny to be queen of the Upper East Side castle, and Jenny is trying to introduce a teenage girl version of perestroika (Yes! They really said that! I love this episode!) to the halls of her high school. No hierarchy! No Queen Bee! No headbands! Well, as anyone that’s been a teenage girl in the past knows all too well, you can’t just leave a power vacuum lying around those people! One of them is going to fill it! Which is exactly what happened: they called Blair and she installed a puppet regime.

And because Blair is struggling with what a lot of people that were popular in high school struggle with (namely: peaking before you make it to college), she heads right back to the UES to hold her annual sleep-over, despite Chuck’s reminder that she’s got to move past her high school self. But Chuck is far to wily to be thwarted, and he takes matters into his own hands.

You see, that actor chick that Dan wants to bang? Fake Hannah Montana? She has a premiere! It’s her first super-serious movie that’s going to launch her career as a super-serious actress and not just a blond girl that gits bitten by vampires. And because this show has to come up with new ways to get all these different characters into the same place at the same time, everyone is going to go to it for one reason or another.

Chuck invites Little Jenny Humphrey (wearing a gorgeous Pucci minidress) to go with him in order to waken the sleeping dragon that is Gossip Girl and send Blair into a jealous rage that will make her forget about high school minions. Fake Hannah Montana invites her new bestie Vanessa (who she will want to stab in the throat by February, because that’s how college roommates are), who brings along Dan, who still doesn’t know that Miley, err, uh, Kate, the cute girl from the coffee cart, is actually Fake Hannah Montana.

Ok, so, yes, all of that. But how does Serena get there? Well, she got a JOB. Well, sort of a job. Lily magically reappeared, back from wherever she was with CeCe (or, from maternity leave, which is where she really was), just in time to bust Serena for not going to Brown and Rufus for not making her go. And then Serena was all, “Well, I’ll show you and I’ll get a job and do something with my life!” Which is silly, because Serena’s family has billions of dollars, and who really cares of she goes to Brown or gets a job or whatever? Lily has never really seemed to care about what her kids do before this.

So while S is looking for a job, we get some cute cameos (this episode was full of ‘em!) by Tory Burch and Marchesa’s Georgina Chapman, but none of them want to hire her on, which is silly, because she’s a publicity magnet and at least nominally, a budding socialite with an eight-figure inheritance coming her way eventually. Plus she’s hot. They could have found SOMETHING for her to do for free. But they turned her down, so she ends up running in to Fake Hannah Montana and her publicist at a restaurant and gives the girl some advice about fleeing the joint without alerting the paparazzi.

So this publicist women seems vaguely impressed (and also, like a total opportunist), so she hires Serena on the spot to be a Diva Wrangler, and this particular diva is Tyra Banks. Well, she’s not called Tyra Banks in the episode, but didn’t you get the impression that that’s how Ty Ty probably acts in real life? I certainly did. But Serena tames her somehow (perhaps with her hypnotic cleavage), and they becomes buddies, but Serena doesn’t have the heart to tell her that her big scene got cut from the movie. And that movie is the same movie that Fake Hannah Montana is in!

Which brings us, finally, to the premiere. Dan has been bummed about Fake Hannah Montana because neither of them really knows if they want to do all of this crazy going-on-dates stuff, and then Dan realizes, suddenly, that he’s at the premiere of her movie. They eventually decide that they do want to bump uglies. Boring. That might have been after the premiere, I don’t even remember. It’s not the good part of the episode.

And neither is the whole Serena/Lily thing. Serena gets fired for not telling her client to pitch a royal fit in public, and Lily gets to be all I-told-you-so because the publicist was only using her for her name and connections. And that sort of begs the question: isn’t that what the entire publicity industry is about? And shouldn’t that make Serena wildly successful at it, even without her squinty brunette boss? And even if she is, who cares, her mom isn’t cutting off the cash any time soon?

The real beauty in all of this is Blair and Chuck. When the Gossip Girl beacon goes out, Blair races our of her sleepover and down to the premiere to lay in to Little Jenny Humphrey over her man-stealing, but Chuck steps in to remind her that she is BLAIR WALDORF! AND HE IS CHUCK BASS! AND IF SHE CAN GET HIM TO TELL HER THAT HE LOVES HER, SHE CAN DO ANYTHING! Including win over the bridge-and-tunnel crowd that populates NYU’s freshman class, which is a seemingly small task by comparison.

And then, in a stroke of genius only ascribable to a true madman like Chuck, he makes sure that a photographer stops her to take her picture on the way out of the premiere, to remind her that she’s a Real, Live Important Person, BECAUSE DUMBO COULD ALWAYS FLY, HE JUST NEEDED A FEATHER TO DO IT! Can you guys give me a moment, please? I need to take a breath.

So Blair and Chuck’s stocks are rising again, and so is Little J’s, because Blair disassembled the puppet regime and Chuck convinced J that she had fought hard for her power and now was no time to give it up. And she didn’t, because she’s a teenage girl, and she might have found it within her to be magnanimous once, but lighting doesn’t strike twice in the same place.

Which sets them all up comfortably for the drama next week: Blair and Chuck are in love, Jenny is at the top of the Constance Billard heap, Dan has a new love interest, and Vanessa got royally shut down by Scott on the phone (so, wait, I guess she’s not that comfortable). And since all is quiet on the Upper East Side front, what else can we do but have Georgina and the Stalker Scott crash Rufus and Lily’s wedding?

Original post by Amanda Mull

Oh, the Gossip Girl writers are so cute. This week’s episode even had a theme! And it was identity and if anyone ever changes, and anyone that’s seen much of the series so far already knows that none of these people ever turn over a new leaf. So, a bit predictable. But still: renewal! Change! All things that people think college will afford them, but everyone, including our Upper East Siders, eventually finds out that a change of scenery doesn’t mean a change of self. And these folks didn’t even really change scenery.

So things went as they usually do: Blair and Chuck were narcissistic, Georgina plotted malignantly, Dan had no idea what to make of the women in his life, Secret Brother Scott continued to want to skin Dan and wear him like last year’s Versace, and Serena had poor taste in men. Carter continued his three-episode streak of not wearing a belt.

First and foremost: Dan and Georgina are so on! Sort of. He doesn’t want to get, you know, tied down or anything. Which is accurate – 18-year-old guys are, by and large, jerks! And 18-year-old girls are often clingy psychos, so Georgina naturally has a picture of the two of them as her computer wallpaper, despite the fact that they’ve only been boning for, what, a week? Two? But Dan likes getting laid and Georgie is happy to oblige him, so he was willing to pretend that she isn’t actually a complete psycho until he was forced to confront further proof of what he already knew, which came from Serena, via Blair and Chuck.

You see, Chuck is trying to become a little businessman, and that requires him to wheel and deal and not bone his girlfriend (the sexing, after all, is what this show is actually about). So in order to impress some club owner with whom he’d like to work, he needs to win an auction of a totally unartistic and Facebook-looking picture of the guy and some chick in a costume in order to impress him. Like his billions of dollars aren’t impressive enough. He eventually realizes that they are and cashes out his shares to buy a hotel, on a whim. I’m not kidding.

And, as luck would have it, Blair wants the exact same mediocre photo. Why? Well, because some secret society with a French name that I can’t remember (I took Spanish, German, and Italian in college. Why can’t they choose one of those?) needs her to win it so she can be a member, of course! Because that makes perfect sense.

But really, Blair should have known better when the invitation she got looked like it was scrawled by an eight-year-old, but she’s so down-and-out because no one at NYU likes her and her boyfriend won’t have sex with her that she doesn’t even realize that, duh, it’s totally fake, and Georgina totally set her up to rip her and Chuck apart, nevermind that there’s no way she could have known that Chuck needed that photo as well.

Even Serena took one look at the invite and knew that it was Georgie up to her old tricks, and when Serena is figuring out social trickery more quickly than Blair, well, the very thought makes my head spin. Plus, she figured out that it was Blair and Chuck setting Carter up to look like he was still a whoring deadbeat – are we experiencing a Serena renaissance?

And Georgina isn’t the only problem in Dan’s life – he’s also got a stalker-y half brother that faked an admission to NYU and seduced his best friend in order to get near him and, possibly, kill him and steal his identity and inhabit his carcass. Well, Vanessa finally figured out that Scott isn’t actually going to classes and as soon as he was confronted with that information, he spilled the beans about his Dan brotherdom and then used the totally undermine-y “If you have feelings for me, you won’t tell” line on her that has so many variations that we’ve all heard from insecure, weasely guys at some point in our dating lives. To Vanessa’s credit (wow, I don’t get to say that very much), she immediately told Dan that Scott’s a lying SOB; she just didn’t tell him exactly what it was about.

So Dan, realizing that Georgina is devious and wicked (and he’s banging her anyway – another scarily accurate detail about dating in college), goes to her with his limited information on that lying liar of a Vanessa-smoocher and they do some Googling and figure out that he’s the same kid that wrote Dan the fan letter about his New Yorker article, and they decide that Scott’s a stalker. For some reason, the writers treat this conclusion like it’s not true, but, well, it totally is. He fake-transfered to NYU, he’s dating Dan’s best friend, he’s taking cheesy guitar lessons from Rufus in Lily’s apartment. The kid’s a stalker. Being a blood relative doesn’t negate the stalkeration!

But when the time comes to cough up the genetic information to Dan and Rufus, he just can’t. His crazy adoptive mom who lied to Rufus and Lily about their child being dead shows up out of nowhere, which probably is what makes him balk, and he instead tells them that he’s the adoptive brother of Rufus and Lily’s dead son, which makes this whole thing obnoxiously difficult to explain in any reasonable string of words.

Vanessa knows, though, and now so does Georgina, because she doesn’t actually go to class, ever. She just spends her days being a creeper outside of people’s dorm rooms so that she can gain information to use against them later, which is where she overhears about the brother scandal and her mind reels with what she might do with that information. You see, when Serena told Dan about Georgina’s Blair/Chuck stunt, Dan tells her that he thinks they should take a “break,” which is silly, because they’re not actually dating, they’re just screwing in a dorm. I know that when you’re 18, that might seem like dating, but it’s not, and no “we need a break” conversation is required.

But for whatever reason, Georgina books a train ticket to Boston to chase after Scott as he returns home and figure out some way to use whatever information she has to screw with the people around her. Oh, and she also deletes the totally creepy Dan Humphrey wallpaper from her computer – no need to sully the MacBook Pro with that foolishness, G.

Oh, right, and Nate. Still with that Buckley girl. She knows Carter somehow. Her family doesn’t like him, which, you know, Carter hasn’t alwaysbeen a very likable guy. This subplot still has no bearing on the rest of the show. Even if it eventually does, I doubt I’ll care by then.

Original post by Amanda Mull

Despite Mother Nature’s best attempt to wash me away in a great flood yesterday (seriously, if you see a girl with a bathrobe and a laptop being swept away on the news, that’s me, SEND HELP), I have survived the torrential rains in this part of the country to bring you a comprehensive review of last night’s Gossip Girl shenanigans.

And what would a Biblical plague in real life be without one to match it on the Upper East Side: Georgina is BA-ACK! And she’s 100% less Jesus-y than she was last season, but we all knew that that was just a clever ruse, didn’t we?

But actually, we’re no longer on the Upper East Side at all – the show has gone downtown to follow our gaggle to college at (mostly) NYU. And as anyone who’s been to college knows, the first few days are bewildering enough to give anyone the look that Chace Crawford gets when the show’s plot gets too complicated for him.

So really, the only surprising thing about the whole college “move” is that Blair Waldorf would deign to dwell below 14th Street. In a dorm. I have no idea why she wouldn’t have Mama Waldorf rent her an adorable apartment in a fashionable area of town that’s closer to campus than the UES manse, but that may be on the horizon for her shortly since Georgina’s clever (well, not that clever. It was pretty straightforward) plan to become her roommate has succeeded.

I’m happy to see Georgie again, not only because I love her wardrobe best of all, but also because she’s the only girl that can give Blair any kind of run for her money in the manipulation and trickery department. And what’s a heroine without her evil foil? Nothing at all. Blair has tried all of her old tricks – intimidation, parties, gift bags – to win followers and minions at college and none of it seemed to work, but Georgina was able to fit right in by identifying Vanessa as Queen of the Hipsters and latching on to her.

We all know that Vanessa is not very quick on the uptake when it comes to manipulative hangers-on (example: Dan’s secret half brother using her to get to the Humphreys. Also, the actor that plays him? The most expressive part of that kid’s body is his Adam’s apple. It was staring at me for the whole episode), so Georgie and V are all of a sudden throwing documentary-viewing parties together, complete with free pizza, in order undermine Blair’s catered sushi party down the hall.

Speaking of which, I have a bone to pick with the authenticity of that moment. I’ve been a college freshman in the past half decade, and from what I understand about the hipster-y student population of NYU (and the similar hipsters that populate an enormous part of the college town I live in), sushi and booze would ALWAYS win over pizza in a dorm room, no matter who was providing the sushi. I would sit through a cult indoctrination if free sushi and booze were promised at the end. On the other hand, free pizza is just about the easiest thing to find in a college dorm, other than a particular, somewhat innocuous illegal drug that may or may not just make you look harder for free pizza. At any rate, at my college, they’d give you free pizza just for going to one of the safe sex seminars put on by the health center in the dorm’s basement, plus they’d also give you free condoms. So, you know. Win/win.

But apparently it’s a particularly geeky sort of hipster that they want us to believe matriculates at the NYU of Gossip Girl Land. Because at the next party, a rooftop soiree complete with Solo cups full of crap beer (accurate, that), it was just a bunch if nerds that Georgina invited, standing around, talking about…I’m not even sure.

And I found myself wondering why Blair even wanted to fit in with this group – she has tons of friends in New York, right? It’s not like she moved to a different country, she just moved downtown. If she has a fleet of Town Cars at her disposal, why does it even matter where she has to attend class a few times a day? And why is she living in the dorms? I know I already asked that question, but it begs repeating.

Because Blair is Blair, however, she couldn’t just leave these folks to their meager college socializing. She had to do something terrible and Blairiffic to show Georgina who’s boss – she called all of G’s friends from Bible Camp to come by and try to convert everyone, on Georgina’s behalf. It wasn’t Blair at her most brilliant, but it was nice to see her up to some of her old tricks. And Dan, in a fit of Personality, got on the microphone, outed Blair’s trick, and convinced everyone to stick around instead of leaving for Blair’s reserved VIP at Monkey Bar. Dejected, Blair sneaked into bed next to Chuck just as Dan (side note: when did his neck get wider than his head?) was waking up on the roof with Georgina. Scandalous.

And Chuck was just as dejected as his ladyfriend. You see, he was trying to turn one of the many barren banks in Manhattan into a restaurant with a secret after-hours club in the downstairs vault, which I think would be kind of cool until some drunken douche bag locked everyone in and then realized he didn’t know how to get them out.

But Serena, drunken, blond, shoeless, and wearing someone else’s suit jacket, stumbled into the leasing meeting for the space and spilled the beans to the guy that had the rights to the building, who didn’t know that there was going to be a secretive, ultra-exclusive club in the basement, and didn’t want that kind of riffraff in his neighborhood. Boo. Riffraff are so fun. And Chuck got mad, and called Serena a trainwreck (which is not inaccurate, since she was hiding out with him because she was supposed to be at college, a place which she had no intention of going, and she doesn’t need a degree anyway, her family is worth billions), and that kind of language just won’t be tolerated.

So what does she do? She calls up Carter Baizen, who is so blindly lustful over her that he can’t even see an obvious Serena Plot in the making (she’s no Blair), and they “accidentally” run into Chuck, having another business meeting about the same property, in a bar that they’re all too young to be in. So Serena and Carter saunter over to his table, start ruining things with hilarious Chuck Bass hooker stories, and Carter finally realizes that he’s just a pawn. But the person manipulating him is really, really hot, so he forgives her later.

And somewhere, in another part of Manhattan, Nate Archibald accidentally locked himself into an apartment with that brunette girl that his family hates, because he’s an imbecile and he doesn’t understand how keys work. And also, neither of them understand how relationships work, because they think that they can figure out all of each others’ bad habits if they spend a full 24 hours in each other’s presence. Obviously, anyone that’s ever been on an ill-advised long weekend trip a little too early in a relationship knows that it takes approximately three days to know exactly why you hate someone. But they didn’t wait three days, so now they’re in love. For at least one or two more episodes.

Original post by Amanda Mull

From time to time I find myself going back to a given handbag over and over again. A few months back, Amanda mentioned the Chloe Kathleen Shoulder Bag in her post about the blue handbag trend. And from that point forward, this is one bag I can’t get out of my mind. I go back and forth thinking that I love it, I want it, I kinda like it, I need it and so on, and so on. Do you have a bag right now that would fit into this category?

Well, the Chloe Kathleen Shoulder Bag is actually a shoulder bag that I’d love to see hanging from my shoulder. Bags of this nature don’t normally make themselves into my closet, but there is no time like the present! One of the first things that drew me in was the urban-chicness of the bag. The grey leather is not dull or boring, it is actually nothing less than gorgeous. The long shoulder strap is long enough that you can wear the bag across your body without the bag itself seeming to snug. I absolutely love the gold hardware and oversized ring that can be found at the front of the bag. It all works so well together. Buy through Net-a-Porter for $1360.

Original post by Shannon Mahoney