I’m interested in Blake Lively’s style but I don’t necessarily feel like she’s a consistently interesting fashionista. She used to have more fun with clothes, which meant she made some big style mistakes – think about her Marchesa phase – which was always fun to discuss. Nowadays, she is more careful. She tries to go for “cute” or “glam,” depending on her mood, and the result is usually kind of boringly pretty. Anyway, Blake got the #2 slot on People Magazine’s Best Dressed list this year, coming in behind Taylor Swift. Swifty’s style makes Blake’s style seem almost avant-garde. For the honor, Blake sat down with People to talk fashion:

Blake Lively has made headlines this year for her expanding lifestyle empire, Preserve, and has fashioned herself as kind of a humble foodie, but after chatting with the 27-year-old actress about her spot on our Best Dressed list, it’s clear that the field she’s an expert in is fashion.

“It’s such a passion of mine,” she tells PEOPLE. “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.” And leave it to Lively to meld two of her favorite worlds: cuisine and couture. “It would be like making a cake and then handing it off to someone else to ice and decorate,” she explains. “Why would you do that?”

Working sans stylist truly lets Lively chart her own red carpet course. “I look at the whole story — I won’t say ‘journey’ because I saw Anna Wintour’s 73 Questions [Vogue] video (ed note: that’s the word Wintour wishes banned from fashion vocabulary) — when doing any sort of press tour or when doing multiple events, and say ok, how can I diversify these looks?” she says. “[I want] to make them exciting but also not totally manic.”

One stop on her multi-gown, ahem, journey at the Cannes Film Festival in May was a graphic yet classic Gucci Première confection she wore to the premiere of husband Ryan Reyonlds‘s film The Captive. “It might be my favorite look I’ve ever worn,” she says. “I just love that old school glamour.”

It was the gown’s “old school” charm that made it one of her contenders for the 2014 Met Gala, where she wore a different stunning Gucci Première design. “It was Charles James-inspired. If you look at the martini silhouette, you can identify that,” she explains of the black fluted accent down the center of the gown. “But because of the theme, there was a risk that someone might be wearing something similar.” True story: even Blake Lively has to consider ways to avoid a fashion faceoff.

In case you often find yourself wondering, “Is there anything that Blake Lively can’t wear?” she says that yes, there is a style the star strays away from.

“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,” she reveals. “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.”

The closest you’ll get to seeing Blake go mod/as a cargohold was her Michael Kors look at the CFDAs, which she says was her “faking the ’60s” because she gave the shift silhouette a little bit of a waist.

[From People]

Yes, there comes a point in every woman’s life when you realize that only Kate Moss can pull off Kate Moss’s clothes. Even a girl like Blake, with her statutesque, leggy, big-boobed figure, cannot pull off the Kate Moss style. But I guess I have to give Blake a slow-clap for really understanding her figure and how to best enhance her assets. She does have a well-proportioned body, but it’s nice to know that she doesn’t feel like she could attempt swinging sack dresses and mod, boxy, ‘60s style stuff. And if Blake thinks she looks like a potato in that style, imagine how a mere mortal would feel in it?

Photos courtesy of WENN.