Eleanor Waldorf's Fashion Line Was Real. What Happened to the Woman Who Actually Designed It?
One of Gossip Girl's best fashion tricks was hiding in plain sight: Eleanor Waldorf had a real designer, and her name was Abigail Lorick. While Eleanor took the credit on screen, Lorick sent her collections to the set and watched Blair, Serena and Jenny wear them in some of the show's best-known scenes. Even the sketches and fabric swatches filling Eleanor's studio came from her.
In 2007, Lorick was 25 and preparing to launch her first label with almost no budget. Her friend Meredith Markworth-Pollack, an assistant costume designer on Gossip Girl, introduced her to producers looking for a real designer behind Waldorf Designs. Lorick brought her Spring 2008 collection. Its bright colors, fitted waists and low backs belonged easily in Blair's world, so her label and the series launched at almost the same time.
The first Lorick piece on screen was an electric-blue strapless dress in season one's "The Wild Brunch." Blair tries it on, hears Jenny praise it and gives it to Jenny because it feels "so last season." Jenny later studies herself in the mirror while wearing it. For a girl desperate to enter Blair's world, the dress does more work than a full speech could.
Two episodes later, Lorick's Spring 2008 backless dresses become the center of "Bad News Blair." Blair wears periwinkle blue with a red belt, while Serena wears the color-swapped coral-red version. Eleanor chooses Serena as the face of her campaign, and the friends eventually run outside in the dresses for their famous photoshoot. Both looks had already appeared in Lorick's real collection.
By season two, production had bought Lorick's entire fall collection. The biggest crossover came in "The Serena Also Rises," where ten looks from her Spring 2009 collection became Eleanor's Fashion Week show. Blair sends the models home, Jenny recruits Serena and the guests, and a real New York collection lands inside a fake runway disaster. Serena's finale look belongs to Jenny within the story, and costume designer Eric Daman later confirmed he was the ghost designer behind Jenny's pieces. Lorick supplied the other Waldorf runway clothes.
The exchange worked in both directions. Margaret Colin, who played Eleanor, attended Lorick's real Spring 2009 presentation to study the designer. The presentation unfolded across seven staged rooms with tiered cakes, croquet and models acting out little scenes. Colin was researching a role whose fictional collection would soon borrow the same clothes. Very Gossip Girl, frankly.
Lorick's designs returned in season three's "The Empire Strikes Jack," when Eleanor presented soft pastels and dotted shorts from her Spring 2010 collection. Lorick even appeared in a few episodes as Eleanor's assistant, briefly standing beside the woman receiving credit for her work.
Gossip Girl changed her young business fast. Viewers searched for the backless dresses, orders rose after the season-two runway, and the label reached major stores in New York and Japan. Yet television had placed Lorick in a polished Fifth Avenue box before she had finished finding her own voice. After four years, she also realized she spent more time running the company than designing. She preferred working with a larger creative team, so she closed Lorick.
Several design roles followed. One introduced her to wetsuits, while another took her to California for four years. Living there brought her back to surfing, a sport she had competed in as a teenager while growing up on an island in Florida. She saw women's surfwear still relied on tiny bikinis and beachy prints, with few cleaner, more covered options.
In January 2020, Lorick co-founded Ansea, a swim and surf label created by women. Its reversible swimsuits use regenerated nylon made from ocean and landfill waste, while its wetsuits use plant-based rubber instead of neoprene. Producing the alternative material creates about 80 percent fewer carbon dioxide emissions. Ansea remains active, while Lorick now works more widely as a designer, creative director and consultant.
The blue dress Jenny stared at in a mirror is still the right place to end: on screen, it gave a teenager a glimpse of the life she wanted, while off screen it placed a young designer's work before millions, even though her name stayed outside the frame. Eleanor kept the name on the studio door, but Lorick proved a designer can outgrow the clothes everyone remembers