It comes as no surprise that Leighton Meester has learned a thing or two about fashion and beauty from her many years as Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl. She admits, “My friend says that before the show I dressed like a homeless person. I used to buy everything at garage sales. It was hard to give up! I’d be like, ‘But this crazy sweater is amazing, and it only cost 25 cents!’ I’ve learned from Blair, though. Now I like to pepper in something designer with my usual stuff.”
But that’s not all that has changed over her years on the set of Gossip Girl. She opens up in the July issue of Lucky about her new view on success, love, and marriage.
“I love love. It’s the most intriguing universally understood emotion, and it comes in so many forms: family love, love of friends. I fall in love with everybody all the time,” she says.
Meester, who has been dating artist Aaron Himelstein since late 2011, may have always been a romantic, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to get married anytime soon. In fact, when asked if she could envision herself never getting married, she replied:
“Yes! Especially now that I know you don’t have to be married to have children; when I was a kid I thought marriage was sex,” she says, laughing. “But if I ever am in a situation where I want to be married, I don’t think I’ll have a big wedding. Hopefully it would be about something way more secure than that.
In the meantime, Meester has plenty of other things to focus on. Gossip Girl may be coming to an end, but Leighton Meester’s presence isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. She has a new film out and an album in the works, but the modest young star is taking it all one day at a time.
“You can’t count on success in this business. And anyway, being famous or rich or making a certain kind of movie—none of that means ‘success’ to me,” she tells Lucky. “Success to me is being happy and fulfilled, truly fulfilled, and being proud of myself and doing different things all the time. So thus far, yes, I’ve been successful.”
photo courtesy Lucky