Kelly Rutherford

Before Penn Badgely acquired his sarcastic smirk, before Leighton Meester had a stylist, before Blake Lively's breasts became the lead characters on Gossip Girl, before Taylor Momsen's '80s glam hair, and before Ed Westwick mastered the Chuck Face, the young actors on the CW show were, shall we say, not quite as polished.

Digging through old photos of the cast, the Daily Transom discovered that the group of twentysomething lead actors--or teenage actors in Ms. Momsen's case--that have become the beautiful young fixtures on red carpets over the past year were once just goofy teenagers with bad skin and terrible fashion sense.  read more »

If Gossip Girl didn't exist, it—or rather, She—would have to be invented. With barbarians at the crossings and cultural turpitude rotting the very Manhattan schist beneath our feet, She alone upholds Truth and Beauty and Order. In the postlapsarian moral universe of today's New York, God, and Wharton and Fitzgerald and Bradshaw, are dead; long live Gossip Girl.

Does this city deserve a muse and creator who imagines it better, stronger, nobler than it's been in untold generations, or ever? Unveiled last autumn, the first episode of the series opened with the return of Serena van der Woodsen—the once and future dauphine of Park Avenue; her surname, a plaintive lament for the town's old Dutch aristocracy, long ago suppressed by the arrival of vulgar Britons—after a semester abroad at a New England boarding school.  read more »

Spotted—also, striped, plaid, and fringed: all said looks were spied Sunday night in a display window at the Henri Bendel flagship on Fifth Avenue. The mannequins, as much as mannequins can be, were less silently bored than articulately, deliberately insouciant: the one on the far left held in her bent left hand a petite Sony Handycam; it was noticeably turned off, and angled at five o'clock, as if the spectators gathered on the sidewalk were obvi(ously) nothing worth committing to tape. Two places to her left, a blond had conjured the year's most fraught sartorial heresy: turquoise thigh-length stockings with color-matched open-toed pumps.  read more »

Vacationing in Miami, Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan "aren't hiding their affection at all." [People]

Long Island girl Nikki Blonsky, of Hairspray fame, could go to court over an altercation with America's Next Top Model's Bianca Golden. The two 19-year-olds got into a physical fight over a row of saved seats in the Turks & Caicos airport last week. [NY Daily News]

In the Hamptons, Gossip Girl mom Kelly Rutherford was overheard telling a companion that her son Hermes Gustaf Daniel Giersch was named after the designer label. [P6]

Morgan Freeman will undergo surgery for injuries sustained during a weekend car wreck. [  read more »