poets

Blake Lively’s Fashion Metaphors Are Top-notch

Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Blake Lively — ever flaxenly elegant in posture, ever confusingly lawless in speech — spoke to People magazine about avoiding stylists. Matching the intrigue of the subject (this is the way of a true artist!), Lively addressed the topic with gleaming gems of metaphorical yarns.

Her quotations, immediately followed by an attempt at close reading, follow:

It’s such a passion of mine. That’s the reason I don’t have a stylist, not because I think I can do it better than any of these people, but because I just love it so much that it would be like handing over something. It would be like making a cake and then handing it off to someone else to ice and decorate. Why would you do that?

Her bod is the cake, by the way.

There are things that I see on Kate Moss and think, ‘I have to have that,’ but when I try it on me I look like a potato …

A potato is a tuberous starch that is indigenous to the Andes, associated with a dearth in Ireland, and known for retaining its rotund shape when boiled.

I don’t like to wear things that don’t look right on my body … that 1920s drop waist, or even ’60s mod. If you don’t cinch in the waist it looks like I’m just hiding, you know, animals? I just start to look like the cargo part of an airplane.

Lively is comparing a silhouette of a clothed figure (hers) to something that might contain creatures, such as a cave or a menagerie. She suggests the “cargo part of an airplane”: a container capable of retaining livestock, certainly.

Reading-comprehension question: Is “drop waist” a metaphor, or no?