Spotted! 20 Years On, What Has Blair Waldorf Been Up To?

Hey Upper East Siders. Hot off the blogs: Blair Waldorf—everyone’s favorite Manhattan socialite, high priestess of headbands, and deliverer of withering one-liners—is making a comeback. Gossip Girl author Cecily von Ziegesar is set to release Blair, a standalone novel picking up 20 years after the original series was set.

While there isn’t much information on the storyline, we know that the book will loosely follow Blair, now in her forties, as she makes her comeback to the Big Apple and climbs a very different social ladder. According to Deadline, the novel will be released in summer 2027.

The Gossip Girl book series was 13 novels long, adapted into the pop culture-defining TV series starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester, which ran from 2007 to 2012. The two finished with Blair on very different trajectories. After a six-season run, TV’s Blair Waldorf is happily married to Chuck Bass, with a son, Henry Bass. She’s running her own successful fashion brand, Waldorf Designs. Then, after a five-year time jump, we see her collaborating with Jenny Humphrey on a clothing line, J for Waldorf. In the books, we don’t get that far: Blair transcends her toxic relationship with Nate Archibald and leaves the drama of Constance behind for Yale.

Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

GOSSIP GIRL, Leighton Meester, Blake Lively (Season 1, 2007), 2007-,. © THE CW / courtesy everett collectionPhoto: Courtesy Everett Collection

What does a modern Blair Waldorf arc look like? Maybe her label is struggling to keep up with the ever-evolving fashion industry in the age of influencers and the algorithm. (And more transparency—a TikTok ‘storytime’ from a Waldorf Designs ex-intern could get nasty.) Maybe she’s hard-pivoted and she’s back at Constance Billard—this time, as headmistress, turning the school into an elite pipeline for power, ambition, and expensive therapy bills for parents. There could be a Waldorf-Bass political dynasty (and some very fabulous fundraisers), or a Blair Waldorf protégé who goes rogue and threatens her carefully curated legacy. She could be navigating raising a child who totally refuses the Upper East Side playbook that she basically wrote—no debutante dreams, no dynastic ambition, something totally out of the manicured tableaux Blair has spent years crafting.

Blair sparked a competitive auction that also included the novel’s film and television rights—there’s no talk just yet about a TV adaptation, but the time gap primes it perfectly for Leighton Meester (who just had an excellent run as unhinged millennial girl boss Alyssa in I Love LA.) to pick up the padded headband again.