The season two finale of HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” arrived on Jan. 26, and it’s quite the ending. News broke that the series won’t be returning for a third season, but our main characters go out with a bang at none other than the Met Gala.
As we all know, the Met Gala is fashion’s biggest night out, and it’s nothing to scoff at as far as the beauty looks go, either. As soon as the hair and makeup teams learned they were going to the Met, they knew they had to do something extra special. After all, if our favorite group of Constance Billard students are on the invite list, they’re going to go all out.
“Every hair and makeup stylist – this is their time to shine,” makeup department head Sheri Kornhaber tells POPSUGAR. “And I think we all felt exactly that same pressure, in a way.”
The process started with the wardrobe. “These costumes are spectacular,” she says. “Everybody’s minds just went racing.” The theme for the big night was the Gilded Age, the same as the 2022 event, but the teams wanted it to be uniquely its own. “Even though it’s a specific theme, everyone brings their own interpretation to the table,” says Michael Zambrano, the series’s hair department head.
Audrey Hope’s (played by Emily Alyn Lind) ensemble has a strong Marie Antoinette feel. “I had an idea of a certain blush look that I wanted to do that was a very vintage look,” says Kornhaber. Zambrano then matched that with a voluminous curled updo.
Zoya Lott (Whitney Peak), on the other hand, walks down the red carpet in a sizable quilted dress that reads, “I Am Gossip Girl,” on the front with her hair in jumbo passion twists. Julien Calloway’s (Jordan Alexander) dress similarly steals the show. The sparkly minidress resembles a chandelier with its glitz and glamour and isn’t dissimilar to a dress that Taylor Swift wore to the 2022 MTV VMAs (that wasn’t intentional, but a fun fact nonetheless).
“It’s funny because we talked about [a] red lip and a strong eye,” Kornhaber says, referring to the singer’s iconic makeup look. However, they decided against it to let the dress shine on its own. “It’s so stunning and so intricate that we just wanted her to be bronzy [and] glowy.”
Opposite Julien is Monet de Haan (Savannah Lee Smith), whose all-black Met Gala look is very vampy with a smoky eye, a deep-plum lip, and an alluring finger-wave hairstyle. The goal was to give her a “darker essence.”
And that’s only the beginning. “I really feel like we put together some really beautiful looks, and I’m very proud of what we did,” says Zambrano.