[This profile contains discussion of sexual coercion.]
Season Three
At the beginning of the season, Nate starts secretly dating Bree Buckley. The Buckleys are the van der Bilts’ political rivals, the Texas Bushes to their East Coast Kennedys. (No relation to William F. Buckley, as far as I can tell.) When Nate proposes making their public debut (3.3), he wears a red polo shirt instead of his usual blue. He is taking cues, yet again, from the woman in his life, this time adopting the color of her hair and political party. Their relationship ultimately dissolves over family rivalries, and Nate is back in blue, supporting his cousin Tripp’s congressional campaign.
On Election Day, Tripp saves a man from drowning in the Hudson River, and his heroic act gives him a needed boost in the polls. He and Nate soon discover that the man was paid to fake his drowning and suspect that their grandfather was responsible (the true culprit, in fact, is Maureen). To prevent Tripp from withdrawing, Nate takes the blame for the setup, wearing, of course, a light blue tie and striped shirt.
Unfortunately, his trust in Tripp is ill-placed: Tripp starts an affair with Serena, and, in a story line obviously inspired by Chappaquiddick, almost kills her in a car accident (3.12). As Nate loses faith in his cousin and his own feelings for Serena grow, he begins wearing more plaids and neutrals. (When Nate punches Tripp outside the hospital, for example, he’s dressed in a dark T-shirt and coat, a plaid scarf.) This new color palette evokes both his increasing distance from his family and his increasing closeness to the Humphreys; Dan, after all, was his rival (and victor) for Serena’s affections in season one. When Nate pursues her in season three, of course he dresses like the man who he thinks Serena wants: plaid-wearing Dan Humphrey.
His worries, perhaps, are misguided: Once Nate and Serena get together, Serena begins wearing Nate’s signature blue button-down to bed (3.14). Though Nate may stick to his new wardrobe of neutrals and plaids, Serena obviously wants only Nate, or at least her blue-clad image of him. Unfortunately, their relationship is haunted by the specters of both Jenny and Dan, and by the season finale, they’ve broken up.
Chuck loans Nate his little black book for the summer, and as the first contacts arrive, Nate wears a comparatively colorful checked shirt; he’s leaving his Humphrey drag behind for a Chuck Bass summer.
Season Four
By the premiere, Nate is tired of Chuck’s lifestyle and ready for another relationship. His next girlfriend and fellow Columbia student, Juliet Sharpe, favors a wardrobe of simple, professional neutrals (all the better to mix, match, and fool everyone into thinking that she belongs in the Upper East Side world). To a Fashion’s Night Out party (4.3) where they make their relationship official, Nate throws a blazer, much like Juliet’s, over his button-down. However, Nate never fully assumes Juliet’s aesthetic, turning back to his season three wardrobe of plaids and neutrals, perhaps because Juliet’s style is inherently chameleonic, designed for Juliet to blend in until she can take her revenge on Serena.
As the season progresses, Nate’s style remains fairly constant, almost as if it’s become who he is, and not a role he’s playing: He chooses cozy neutral sweaters, Henleys, or flannels, usually with jeans. He interacts more with his mother and father (now released on parole) but wears almost none of the preppy blue pieces that he did in seasons one and two. He has a short relationship with Chuck’s ex-girlfriend Raina Thorpe but never assumes her sleek business-professional style. I begin to wonder if Nate has completely abandoned his role as the Brad Pitt of Gossip Girl, until episode seventeen, when Raina learns that her father is not who she thinks he is. Nate comforts her, saying, “Finding out your father isn’t the person you grew up idolizing sucks, but it doesn’t mean he loves you any less.” Under his coat, he wears a light blue button-down and navy knit scarf, hints at the wardrobe he once wore out of obligation to his family but with a softer edge of wisdom and peace.
In the finale, Nate and Chuck decide to spend the summer traveling. As they spin the globe to find their first destination, they share the same color palette, united once again in their friendship.
Season Five
In the premiere, Nate and Chuck land in California, where Serena is spending the summer. There, Nate meets and sleeps with a mysterious older woman (played with obvious relish by Elizabeth Hurley) at her house party. He returns to the house to retrieve his phone and learn her name, dressed in a rumpled blue shirt. (In fact, his whole summer wardrobe is much like the one he wore that summer in the Hamptons.) The woman gives him his phone but not much else, and he goes back to New York still thinking of her.
In episode two, Nate asks Anne to help him land a fall internship, hoping he’ll find renewed direction. Both Senator Schumer and Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs are “interested,” but Nate ends up running into the mystery woman, Diana Paine, and accepting her offer of an internship at her recently acquired newspaper, The Spectator, instead. “Just remind [your family] what George did for JFK Jr.,” she says. Nate thinks the Spectator internship will allow him to establish himself outside of his family and stay close to Diana. His own blue plaid shirt and Diana’s Kennedy reference should tell him that someone else is at work here.
As Nate begins working at The Spectator, his wardrobe transitions to slim suits and ties; on his first day (5.3), naturally, a blue tie and a faint plaid shirt: a touch of both old and new Nate. Unlike his uniform tie, this tie is knotted carefully and pulled tightly, showing how seriously he’s taking his new role. And of course, the new look is meant to impress the new woman in his life, Diana.
Episode eight confirms that Nate didn’t get the job on his own merits, and the reappearance of his blue wardrobe suddenly makes sense: William van der Bilt is the paper’s majority investor, Diana his placeholder for Nate. After Diana takes the blame for their release of Gossip Girl’s sources, Grandfather fires Diana and names Nate the new editor in chief—dressed, again, in blue. “Congratulations,” he tells his grandson. “You’ve earned it.” And Nate, who only a few episodes ago wanted to establish himself without his family, accepts this.
Still, Nate tries to put his loyalty to the paper over his family: For his first day as editor, Nate trades his blue palette for gray and red, the same colors as The Spectator’s offices and logo (5.9). He receives a fake tip about his cousin Tripp’s wife, Maureen, and instead of running or burying the story, publishes a letter saying that The Spectator will stand for honesty, not wealth or connections.
A few episodes later, Nate cuts ties entirely with William, telling him that it’s the only way success “will mean anything” (5.12). William is still in blue, but Nate is completely drained of color, seemingly done with the van der Bilt influence.
With no major investor, Diana returns to the paper and Nate begins to uncover her secrets, even sleeping with her to steal her coded day planner. The planner leads Nate and his friends to Diana’s high-end sex club, and Nate tries to use this information to blackmail Diana into leaving The Spectator for good. She asks him not to, telling him that The Spectator was her way of leaving the stigma of sex work behind: “I can’t go back to my old life, and I stand no chance of starting a new one with my name in the headlines. Must you keep me here to humiliate me on top of all that?” (5.23). Nate listens and lets her go.
In this scene, Nate wears a pale pink shirt and burgundy tie, echoing the Spectator reds that he wore on his first day as editor. This time, however, he abandons his own honesty for hers, his relationship with Diana bringing his relationship with Catherine full circle: Nate once worried that the money he took from Catherine would hurt his reputation, and instead of hurting Diana’s, he gives her the fresh start she desires. As a thank-you, Diana sends him surveillance footage of the shadowy figure they suspect to be Gossip Girl, and Nate decides to finally uncover the blogger’s identity for his paper.
Season Six
In the last season, Nate is trying to keep The Spectator afloat, looking for new investors after cutting ties with William and Diana, hoping that his exposé on Gossip Girl will bring him the readership and ad revenue that he desperately needs. Chuck’s father, Bart, offers to back the paper in exchange for puff pieces on him and his wife, Lily (6.4). When Nate turns him down, Bart muses, “I have no doubt you will succeed, especially if you’ve inherited your father’s gift with numbers. He was always so . . . inventive.” This planted seed blooms into Nate faking the numbers on his loan application (a loan on which Bart is a secret cosigner, so he can blackmail Nate into hurting Chuck. I know, right?). In his scene with Bart, Nate wears the same slim suit and tie that he came to favor in season five, the white shirt with a subtle black stripe, almost like prison stripes.
By episode nine, Bart has had Nate arrested. Nate no longer trusts the van der Bilts, so his new girlfriend, Sage (who is a senior in high school, by the way!!), calls “someone who has experience with this kind of situation”: Howard.
Nate, again, is wearing stripes: this time, gray-blue with little touches of red, connecting him to both the paper and his father. Howard himself is dressed in a blue shirt and yellow-and-blue-striped tie, tying him completely to his son and the family’s legacy. Once Nate is released on bail, Howard goes with him to confront Bart—though somehow his argument that Nate “worked his ass off to build that paper” doesn’t quite unfreeze Bart’s icy heart. (Perhaps Bart is just as skeptical as I am.)
Luckily for the Archibalds, Bart falls to his death at the end of the episode, leaving Nate the only signer on the loan. Dan gives The Spectator the last chapter of his book—the one in which he reveals himself as Gossip Girl—and Nate’s paper is well on its way to success (6.10).
In the five-year flash-forward, Nate emerges from a Spectator-branded plane. He’s back in blue, his tie in Spectator red—a little wider, more mature, than the thinner versions he wore five years earlier. Like a baby Bloomberg, he is heading a media empire and planning a run for mayor—“on track to do exactly what [I] wanted to do,” as he says in the previous scene. From far off, I scream, “Are you??”
If you read my first issue, then you know that I hate season six. If the writers meant the series to be a tragedy, even a satire, then the last season works. If they meant the finale as a happy ending, then they must have been smoking the same stuff that Nate was in season one when he asked, “Do you ever feel like . . . we’re just going to end up like our parents?” Because he does, doesn’t he? He’s running a paper that was gifted to him by his grandfather, just as his father’s own firm was years before; he’s considering a run for mayor, just as his cousin Tripp ran for Congress. He even almost went to prison for fraud, just like his father.
Nate may think he’s his own man, may have finally settled in his own style, but the van der Bilt blue still beams through. It doesn’t matter if Nate’s wardrobe is full of youthful, fashionable suits and ties; he may as well be wearing his father’s and grandfather’s banker’s collars, his mother’s ties. “You can’t fight against who you are,” Nate once said—but sometimes you forget which currents carried you there.
[I’m starting to dream in Gossip Girl, so for my own well-being, profiles will now be published every two weeks, perhaps with some mini issues in between. Join me Thursday, 12/31, for a profile of Lily Rhodes (van der Woodsen/Bass/Humphrey).]
DP on GG
My partner, Daniel, spent 2020 overhearing episodes of Gossip Girl from various rooms of our apartment. He still doesn’t understand the show and he doesn’t care.
DP: I don’t know what a Chaste Crossword looks like.