The Girls Can't Help It.(Blake Lively and Leighton Meester)(Interview)

Byline: Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

On a shopping tour of New York's private-school stretch, Gossip Girl' s Blake Lively and Leighton Meester tutor Eve MacSweeney in the subject of personalized style.

Can we go to Chanel?" asks Blake Lively, her eyes sparkling as brightly as her diamond double- C earrings at the prospect.

Lively, who plays leggy blonde Serena van der Woodsen in the addictive CW series Gossip Girl, is having a late breakfast at E.A.T. on Madison Avenue with her on-screen best friend/sparring partner Leighton Meester--doe-eyed brunette Blair Waldorf on the show--and planning a morning's shopping on the strip its characters call home.

Joining the cast of Gossip Girl is turning out to be an expensive decision for Lively and Meester, who both came east from Los Angeles for a crash course in the ways and wardrobes of ultrasophisticated New York private schoolgirls in a drama that gives as much weight to its characters' fashion choices as to their dialogue--and, for once, actually gets it right. "We like to joke because it's such a fashiony show, like, 'What are you wearing? I'm in Channel, or Valentine-o, ' " says Meester, spoofing this learning curve.

To research the characters' style, costume designer Eric Daman, a former assistant to Sex and the City' s Patricia Field, observed real-life Serenas and Blairs on the Upper East Side to see how they personalized their school uniforms. "At that point the Tory Burch flats were just coming out, and these girls were already wearing them, and the Lanvin flats, and they had the newest Balenciaga bags and Gucci bags and were really on the cusp before the cusp even hit," he says. "They're definitely on top of it." For the characters' evening looks, he turned to slightly older girls-about-town such as Arden Wohl and Tinsley Mortimer, for whom dressing to go out is a form of entertainment in itself.

Thus a frenetic amount of energy goes into finding clothes from up-and-coming designers, the kind whose reputations young socialites help to build, along with hot pieces from grander labels, and mixing them up just so. The exquisitely groomed Blair's ensembles are put together with plenty of Valentino, Alberta Ferretti, and Diane von Furstenberg, along with Phillip Lim, Derek Lam, and Thread Social. Serena, whose look is more thrown-together (and we all know how hard it is to achieve the appearance of not trying too hard), is often seen in pieces by Stella McCartney, Vena Cava, Jovovich-Hawke, and Alexander Wang.