Blake Lively's Preserve.us and the Desperate Quest for Authenticity in the Digital Age

Blake Lively’s lifestyle website Preserve was released last week and the internet - right on cue – ripped it apart. Some amount of giddy opprobrium was to be expected. Even Lively saw it coming, predicting “plenty of people who will say horrible things” in her interview for the August issue of Vogue. But she was referring to the public’s love of ridiculing celebrities. That accounts for part of the abuse, no question. But I’m sure we could have found a way to forgive Lively her stardom and acknowledge that she’d made a good website – if she had made a good website. Unfortunately, she made Preserve.

Where to begin. There’s the writing, which is overthought, overwrought, and under-edited. Most of the copy reads like it came from a thirteen year old (or a beautiful, famous 26 year old) who has never been told to scale it back. There’s also the weird tone deafness of the site’s philanthropic side. It’s good that the company wants to do nice things for those in need, but there’s something uncomfortable about dedicating an entire section (one of only three tabs at the top of the homepage) to the fact that somewhere out there people are starving and they intend to kind of help. A classier move would be to mention in a discreet footer that a percentage of the proceeds were going to a specific charity. Speaking so blithely about human suffering while reminding us that they are a for-profit company (I’m sure we’re supposed to be refreshed by the transparency) is somehow callous and sanctimonious at the same time. The bleeding heart capitalist asking for absolution so that she can sell $40 sea salt with a clear conscience.

But all of that could be overlooked if the site was showing us something new. If it had tapped into some nascent trend, and was ready to introduce us to our future tastes. And if it had been released ten years ago maybe it would have done so. But it came out in 2014, and hipsters everywhere have been doing the whole upscale rustic thing for a good while now. “Artisanal” has replaced “organic” as the fastest way to get cool young folk to pay a premium for something they don’t need. The aesthetic was well enough established in 2012 that Portlandia was able to flawlessly mock it with the sketch “The Dream of the 1890s.”

Preserve aims to introduce the past (as personified by a dude in a bowler hat writing poetry on a typewriter) to the future (e-commerce websites). Thing is, these two worlds have already met. In San Francisco, the heart of the tech boom, pretty much every business catering to the Google Glass set is lousy with hand-carved tables, small batch goods, and vintage light fixtures. And every stand at every flea market has an Instagram account and Twitter handle RTG.

It’s no surprise that the Gossip Girl star’s tastes are not exactly cutting edge. Trends are invented by outsiders, creeping inwards until they can be tamed and mass produced for maximum profit. Now that the stylized nostalgia craze has reached the point in its lifecycle where a Hollywood starlet believes she came up with it herself, perhaps it is time to retire and move on. There are other signs: on August 4^th the New York Times published an article about a recent spike in barn weddings (weddings held – often by rich city folk with a yen for the pastoral – in a barn) and how annoying they are to the actual farmers next door. Articles like this one remind us of what we really are: posers. Posers who crave the authenticity that we associate with the past, while becoming increasingly reliant on modern gadgetry.

Why is this? Perhaps we feel like our attachment to the days of yesteryear when everything was simpler and faintly sepia tinted (right?) is the only thing keeping us from a full-blown sci-fi dystopia. If we don’t keep buying Polaroid cameras on Amazon and decorating our apartments with rusty (sorry, oxidized) 50s Coca Cola advertisements, then we may as well surrender to our robot overlords.

Or not. According to the site’s description, the creators of Preserve “believe that nurturing a better tomorrow upholds the yesterday we cherish”.  Maybe so – but they skipped a day. Is it me or has the present been getting the shaft recently? We’re always either distracting ourselves from immediate reality with our phones, or drooling over how great some other era was (20s, 60s, 90s, pick a decade). Maybe it’s time to pay a little more attention to the here-and-now, instead of waiting for the retroactive rosy glow to set in. Maybe for once we could try knowing what we’ve got before it’s gone.

Or we could drop $20 on a wooden cocktail muddler because Serena Van Der Woodson wrote a free verse poem about it. Either way.