Selma Blair’s memoir Mean Baby is about many things, the most unexpected being the lengths the actress would go to for a very good pair of pants.
In fourth grade, she writes, she dared a classmate to swallow staples so she could inherit her jeans when she (presumably) died. Her classmate folded the pointy tips in and ate them but the day came and went without event. Years later, Blair would succeed in possessing jeans (sans lethal ingestion) that belonged to a college classmate when she unintentionally stole a pair from the laundry room. After wearing the jeans for months, Blair discovered they belonged to her summer roommate Tammy, who never confronted her. But the actress’s favorite pants of all time aren’t ones that involve accidental thievery or an office supply demise. They’re the classic pleated khakis from Gap, which she most recently modeled while starring in the brand’s Fall 2022 Icons campaign. “I don't know if I even covered the effect fashion had on me in the book at all. Because, you know, it was such an emotional kind of memoir, but fashion was really the thing that made me feel good,” says the actress in an interview.
To showcase its latest collection of essential updated classics, Gap wanted to spotlight American optimism and cast icons like Blair, alongside singer Labrinth, models Cameron Russell and Lucky Blue Smith, and professional race car driver Toni Breidinger, who shape culture by being steadfast individualists. For Blair, that involves wearing her beloved Gap khakis. She admitted that she still owns every pair she’s ever bought, including a couple that belonged to her high school boyfriend (no dares or secret robbery involved). They’ve become part of her uniform. “When I show up somewhere and people are dressed to the nines,” she says, “I'll be wearing a Gap tank, my favorite big pleated Gap khakis, and the greatest pair of Chanel boots. Then I'm set for the whole day.”
And while khakis have been a staple of Blair’s wardrobe for decades, the cane she’s also photographed with has only been present in her wardrobe since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018. “Movement has been so important to me my whole life,” she recalls. “I was a gymnast. I always wanted to be a dancer, but I never had any talent, never even took a lesson, and then to have my movement compromised...” She pauses before continuing, “But then I found the cane and realized how much I could work around it and how much coordination I still had, despite certain glitches. That freed me up so much.” She may have never become a dancer but she still refers to her cane as her “dance partner.” For one powerful Icons campaign shot the duo can be seen in a full lunge, Blair’s toes pointed in sharp ankle boots with her cane front and center as if in a ballet first position.
Blair has been applauded for these kinds of photos. People call her brave for letting her diagnosis share the spotlight in an industry known for photoshopping out the smallest of imperfections. Yet she can’t imagine it any other way. “I need to be comfortable in my skin to show other people that there are all these possibilities of how you can present yourself that makes you feel good,” she says. Her honesty almost feels at odds with the flawless aspiration fashion is known for selling, but Blair still believes in the dream while representing what it doesn’t normally look like. “Fashion really was the thing that made me feel attractive to tell you the truth,” she says. “It made me feel anything was possible.”
Her love of fashion is all over the pages of Mean Baby, where she described the eyepatches she wore in her youth to correct a vision malady as “a bit Gaultier, like Madonna’s cone bra.” She chronicles borrowing her mother’s Burberry trench coats and her thrifted royal blue Repetto ballet flats in vivid detail. Wearing secondhand clothes at her rich prep school made her stand out but in a way she remembers fondly. “I was just this person going through it and it saved me to have confidence in my personal style,” she says. “It was all fashion for me even before I knew about fashion.”
And it was in many ways always the Gap too. Before landing her first acting job, Blair worked at the Upper East Side Gap, selling Jessica Capshaw her jeans and Valentino the “perfect” pocket tee. “He was buying pocket tees from me,” she recollects. “I felt like I was part of something. I felt like anything is possible in any part of fashion.” Now, nearly thirty years later, Blair is still selling the Gap. Except this time it’s not just to actresses or designers but to people who’ll point to her as an example of why fashion makes them feel hopeful—and who would probably do whatever it takes, dare or not, to get their hands on those famous pleated khakis.
Tara Gonzalez is the Senior Fashion Editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Previously, she was the style writer at InStyle, founding commerce editor at Glamour, and fashion editor at Coveteur.
