Blake Lively’s new website Preserve tells tales of not a lot

It’s tough to be overly critical of Lively’s new website, Preserve, simply because all the best intentions are clearly there. They promote the fine work of up-and-coming artisans as well as selling their pieces on the site, and though this has caused their shop area to become an odd mismatched accumulation of everything from food to fashion, this is an admirable direction to take. In addition to this, their charitable aims are substantial, hoping to give thousands of children in need within the US a blanket, a meal and a warm hoodie. Again, these goals are not to be condemned… But wow, the website itself is bizarre and a little bit awful.

The look of the site is moody, an array of beige nostalgic text amongst wooden textures and black backdrops. The images aren’t much better, aiming for a dreamy sort of ethereal view of the normal and day to day, they’ve simply achieved the look of a hundred identical Instagram filters belonging to photographic novices trying to make their amateur photos look meaningful. However, we could get past these faux pas if it weren’t for the written content stretched out beneath these images.

The difficulty is that it sounds very compelling and ponderous to begin with, but after sifting your way through four or five articles you quickly realise that you’ve read a lot of words saying nothing at all. Again, the dreamy attempts at the deep and thoughtful have been transcribed into a thousand waffling pieces oozing self-indulgence. As one of the less grammatically offensive examples, here is a snippet from a style piece about bow ties:

“Once upon a time in the South, a few good men gathered for a wedding. These men looked over a set of bow ties with a sense of awe, respect, and (most predominantly) confusion. In a matter of minutes, they needed these loose pieces of unrealized cloth to transform into something akin to timeless elegance.”

Unrealized cloth… It’s a bit much really, isn’t it? One can appreciate trying to verbalise the art and emotion that goes into various peoples’ passion and the history behind it, but there’s only so much cheese you can melt onto a pizza before it starts dripping off the edges onto the floor. It’s a mess, and Perserve’s articles have no balance between the ponderous romanticism and the logically legible.

All in all, there is some credit to be given for the purpose of Preserve. Lively is correct in that there are many stories to be told throughout the world, and it would be a massive shame to let them dim into non-existence.A celebrity backed page for storytelling has a lot of promise, but Preserve needs to shake all the bad press off as a sorry first attempt, to lose all the cheesy waffle and to come back with fireworks rather than tumbleweed.

Elizabeth Finney

Visit the website here.