Last week, red-carpet sweetheart Blake Lively launched her very own website, Preserve. Naturally, when a Hollywood star-slash-style icon of the moment purchases a pulpit, er, Internet domain (like Gwyneth Paltrow before her), fans and tabloids pay attention. But, notably, it hasn’t only been the fashion-and-celeb-watching media weighing in since—nor has really anyone been kind. (The Cut has practically made skewering Preserve an ongoing series, while neither Slate nor WashPo were above dissecting/making fun of its content.)
Covering an ambitious range of lifestyle topics, from food culture, style, and wellness to “Intimacy,” “Culture,” and “Projects” (we’re not entirely sure what most of them actually mean), the site isn’t exactly a sporadic, one-gal operation from Lively’s home in Bedford. Throughout the bafflingly hard-to-navigate “Summer Issue,” an unnamed “We” waxes philosophical on things like “what is so enchanted and profound about apples” and the supposedly sacred act of tying a bow tie.
Despite the generally affected prose and overwrought concepts making up articles like “The Great Gathering: Delights and dalliances of the American summer barbecue”—beginning, “Allow us to be so bold as to posit that a barbecue is an inherently medieval affair”—and “Backwoods Barbie,” a slightly confused fashion editorial with a trying-too-hard backstory, we’re not totally on the Blake-bashing bandwagon.
After the initial amusement over discovering the Gossip Girl is such a wannabe hipster, we had to commend her for taking a chance—and denting her glossy-perfect image, even just a little bit. “I’m more intimidated than I should probably admit,” Lively writes in her editor’s letter, which is conspicuously free of gratuitous glamour shots (another point for team Blake). “I’m no editor, no artisan, no expert. And certainly no arbiter of what you should buy, wear, or eat.”
True to this self-effacing testament, the project succeeds best in guiding readers towards things they might like, as opposed to, elsewhere, attempting to tell them what that is. Taking a cue from Lively’s Bedford neighbor, Martha Stewart, a section of the site showcases small-operation American craftsmakers and their wares, including Bedford-based tie label General Knot (to whom we’ve been onto for years, but that’s neither here nor there).
Admittedly, we can’t help but hypothesize that life in the county may have influenced the actress’ reverence for the provincial-cool outlook, so there’s that, too. In summary, we don’t know how much stock we’ll be taking in Preserve’s literary recommendations, but we might actually try this peach tart recipe.
