The Gossip Girl Fashion-Industrial Complex

Gossip Girl is currently on summer hiatus (season two starts in two months!), but that hasn't stopped the show from influencing the behavior of aspirational teenagers and twenty-somethings everywhere. No, not in that it encourages underage drinking and drugging and sexing, as the show's prep school characters do week in and week out: the Times reports that Gossip Girl has become "one of the biggest influences on how young women spend." It seems female fans of the show are so eager to ape the fashions of Serena and Blair and little Jenny Taylor that they literally rip pictures of the stars out of magazines and flee to the nearest boutiques to buy the threads in person, or else try to buy the clothes online right on the Gossip Girl website.