Blake Lively can really rock a look—no matter its cost.
Thanks to a newly published InStyle interview, the Hollywood style star proved her fashion prowess when she revealed a little fib she used to tell back in the day.
While chatting with The Handmaid's Tale actress Sydney Sweeney for the magazine interview, Lively shared a style secret she kept early on.
"I read that you don't work with a stylist. How did you start developing relationships with designers?" Sweeney inquired. "I remember you wore a Forever 21 dress to one of your first red carpets."
"I wore Forever 21 much longer than I admitted," Lively responded. "I just started saying it was vintage because I was so shamed for it."
There you have it: one of the biggest trendsetters in modern Hollywood used to don Forever 21 on the red carpet—and there's absolutely no shame in that.
As Lively advised Sweeney, channeling a certain superstar can always help on the red carpet, too.
"With some outfits you need to do a smolder because if you're wearing a slit up to your hip bone and you're smiling like you're on Space Mountain, it just doesn't go together. It took me a few years to learn it too," the actress advised. "If you pretend that you're J.Lo, that helps."
It may be a comfort to know that even Lively didn't always have the red carpet figured out.
"For one of my first events, I wore a dress that I was so insecure in, but I was told that I couldn't back out because it was made custom and it would hurt my relationship with the designer," she recalled. "It didn't fit right though, and everybody knew it was a mess. Whenever I look at a photo from that red carpet, I can see how uncomfortable I was in my own skin. I'd never do that again."
The new May 2019 Beauty Issue of InStyle is available now.