Reese Witherspoon is taking a well-earned victory lap in the current issue of The Edit, net-a-porter.com’s in-house online magazine. Reese has carved out a great niche for herself as a film and television producer, and in the past four years, she’s done Wild (which earned her an Oscar nom), produced Gone Girl and produced and starred in Big Little Lies. Reese successfully remade her celebrity-brand into “professional producer, in-demand actress and multi-hyphenate entrepreneur.” All following her drunken American Citizen arrest. Anyway, Reese is very wholesome looking in this editorial and I don’t hate anything she says… for the most part. Some highlights:
After the age of 40: “You know who you are, who your friends are, what you want to accomplish and what you don’t care about. It’s liberating not having to worry so much about what other people think of you. I mean, look, I’m still an actor…”
Her breakout: “I remember doing Legally Blonde and thinking, this is my first film that isn’t about a romantic entanglement; it’s about a woman finding her own destiny. There certainly were romantic aspects to it, but it wasn’t the driving part of her story.”
Women in film: “It’s hard to be a female director, or a female writer, or an actress over 25. I think the dawn of streaming and the way that people are watching content now has been a great benefit because maybe women are too busy to go all the way to the theater, but they still want to see a diverse array of women on screen. I’ve been hearing for 27 years that women don’t show up to see women in movies, and I know empirically that is not true.”
Why she started Draper James, her clothing/lifestyle company: “I don’t know why New York and LA have become the places that dictate how everyone else is supposed to live. There’s this whole world in-between of people who love style and have incredible taste. And it was an opportunity for me to tell the stories about my grandmother, my biggest influence. She taught me to love books and how to dress, but she taught me about feminism, too. She got a master’s degree in 1942, but there were no jobs. I’ve always felt like carrying on her legacy because she put all that into me.”
She refuses to stay in one box: “I really reject the idea that women have to stay in one life. People have said, ‘You can’t start a company; just stay being an actress.’ Why are women supposed to be one thing? Nobody thinks Robert De Niro is stepping outside [his boundaries by] owning hotels and restaurants. Life has many chapters. You have to think, what am I going to do next?”
What she tells her kids: “I always tell my kids: you can’t be anybody else. Someone’s always going to be thinner, or richer, or better at their job. You can only be the best version of yourself, so that’s what you should strive for – the best version of you.”
“I don’t know why New York and LA have become the places that dictate how everyone else is supposed to live.” I still don’t know what to think or how to feel about Reese’s continued pander to Southerners. Like, she’s a Southern woman, she’s proud of being from the South and all of that. But I live in the South too, and it feels like Reese and women like Blake “Allure of Antebellum” Lively are really pandering to this idea that Southern women are all genteel, and that we’re all so fancy and we really want delicate clothes and we all live on former plantations. Southern women are like women everywhere else – some of us are fashionable, some of us aren’t. Some of us are classy, some aren’t. Some of us are ignorant, some aren’t. And we aren’t looking at New York and LA for tips on how to live. People who think that Southern women are looking at LA and New York for lifestyle or fashion tips are the people who live in New York and LA.
Photos courtesy of The Edit.
I didn’t read into that the same way really – I heard “there should be better examples”. I don’t think it’s as much southern-pandering as it is middle America-pandering. But I’m not really bothered by it. Granted, I’m not adding the context of actually living in the South, but reading it I didn’t feel like Reese was trying to do the we’re-so-prim-bless-your-heart thing that I know exists. Idk.
What I’m saying is I’d take Draper James over Goop any day.
THIS: it feels like Reese and women like Blake “Allure of Antebellum” Lively are really pandering to this idea that Southern women are all genteel, and that we’re all so fancy and we really want delicate clothes and we all live on former plantations.” THIS IS IT!! … This stuff to me Reads/sounds and looks like a Dog Whistle, The same Waspy Dog Whistle that Gwyneth and Taylor operate on… The Know-Best-Classiness-UberStyle of a Certain Kind of Woman… the Ivankant Voting Block that Consumes their crap.. Is a sweet Subtle way to let em know: Oh No Honey we Still Say God Bless But we’d NEVER feature “those Kinds of women or their Loud ass Not Pale Flower print on our Stuff, so Don’t worry Susan, we’re not Doing “Diversity” even our site Palettes will assure you of this.. Seersucker All the way Baby”
Nailed it.
There’s nothing particularly “southern” about the aesthetic. It’s basically a midcentury spring and summer casual that everyone from Nantucket to Malibu wore.
So I guess if you’re evoking that time period and consciously linking it to the South, then your particular brand of nostalgia is for segregation?
mte!!! though of course her ego-ness doesn’t see it that way, no no….
No, she created the label to further line her pockets.
You want to share and spread southern culture? Well pick up a f*cking history book first, before glorifying ‘plantation style’; I grew up in Georgia, and in many ways it was a wonderful wonderful place to live, but not without its problems – this whitewashing of what is means to be ‘southern’ is ridiculous and offensive. I’ll take GOOP over this shit anyway (she is ridiculous, too, btw).
How Southern is she? She started in the business as a very young kid. I always thought she’s been playing this up hard as some sort of identity thing.
The clothes do kind of have a “Smile to your face while stabbing you in the back” vibe that I associate with the South from growing up there, so I guess mission accomplished.
Hahaha this. Southern women (not all of them, but many) are the worst. They call you honey and sweetheart to your face and stab you in the back in a heartbeat.
Like that old saying, “don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.”
I’ll take an honest straightforward person any day of the week.
My older sister is very Southern Belle, I am an urban person. We are from Mississippi and while she enjoys all of the trappings of that social circle, I wear Bermuda shorts and t-shirts. She is speaking to a social class in the South IMO, but it is not very large. I’m thinking Guns and Gardens magazine and Ole Miss.
Is there really a magazine called Guns and Gardens? That’s very specific lol
It’s “Garden and Gun” and it’s actually a pretty good lifestyle magazine (food, culture and leisure – it doesn’t feature shotguns).
That bedazzled sweater is tacky. Yikes.
The whole photo is so, so bad. Cover photo is nice though.
Well, beside the pitchers with sweet iced-tea, her fashion looks very LA and NY to me.
I have a hard time caring about the Draper James stuff. It screams middle America to me. I’d rather look to NY or Europe for fashion, something with an international flair or an understanding of the modern world.
I’ve always liked Reese but I have never, ever looked at her as being a Southern Belle and I’m from the South. I think what she’s selling is a very stereotypical version of what she thinks or fantasizes what the South should be like. I think a couple of the pieces from Draper James are cute but the rest look a bit ridiculous and when Reese herself wears them out in public for her pap strolls she looks like a caricature of herself. And the whole “Hey ya’ll! Let’s drink some sweet tea, ya’ll! Bless your little heart, you sweet thang!” thing is so annoying.
I know a lot of people think it’s cute but I can’t imagine making an entire brand out of it and making a fortune from it. I’m just not buying what she’s selling.
Like every other fashion line, I like some of the items sold by Draper James and some I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. I really do like Reese (always have), I know she’s made mistakes, but who hasn’t? I really think she tries to lift women up and to me, that’s really important. We all complain about lack of diversity and here is someone trying to make a difference, yet every time she speaks she gets that same old incident thrown in her face.
I just went and took a look at the site. I did not see much that I found either stylish or particularly Southern, except maybe for the (yuk) t-shirts with the “y’all” on them. I don’t know who’s designing the stuff, but it’s extremely meh. And waaaaay overpriced. Otherwise I have liked her movies. And I loved Big Little Lies (the book–haven’t seen the series).
If she’s selling shirts that say “y’all” she really is just an LA girl playing southern belle.
And the photoshop awards go to…
So obnoxious and egotistical. She acts like she’s the first female celeb to start a business. Beyoncé is the biggest example out there. So are Paltrow, Alba, and many more. I don’t disagree that sexism exists but she’s acting like we’re in the early 20th century.
Living outside of Los Angeles, I can second the myopic belief that Los Angeles is one of the two centers of the world. I know Angelinos who won’t move out of Los Angeles because they wouldn’t feel cool anymore. Ridiculous but true.
There is something so off-putting about her.
I don’t know much about the south but I don’t associate it so much with antebellum than with southern goth, like Cookie’s Fortune, Midnight in the Garden of G & E, etc.
I think it’s kind of a sad commentary if Southern women are looking to Reese Witherspoon for their style mojo…..first of all, she IS LA, so how does that work? Second of all, I don’t think of her as someone who has any innate style or vision. She always looks like she’s dressed by a stylist right from a catalog. Her venture screams to me Hollywood actress nearing her expiry date so she created a brand hoping it’ll take off like the Jessicas Simpson or Alba.
Maybe she “panders” to southern women because unless you’re a southern woman yourself, you’re left with the very stereotypical portrayal as them as either dumb belles, rude rednecks or ultra conservative stay at home moms. Seriously, that’s the image I had of southern women from growing up watching movies. So I don’t think what she’s doing is bad.