There’s a one-eyed dog, a wall decal that reads “Amaze Balls,” a man talking to tombstones, and floating lanterns in the style of Tangled! Blake Lively‘s new lifestyle website Preserve, which launched Monday, July 21, also features a beautiful but slightly sinister introductory video. (An unnerved Vulture.com post hilariously argues that the video espouses “deathstyle website.”)
The clip, which was created by Brian Rowland, begins with atmospheric outdoor lighting of a young girl writing in a journal underneath a tree. As piano and violin music plays in the background, Lively flashes across the screen on several occasions—driving, buying cookbooks, hugging a woman, enjoying the sunset on a dock, and laughing as she’s surrounded by floating lanterns.
The Nature of Consciousness, a work by late British philosopher Alan Watts, is read aloud in the background. “Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time,” the voice reads in the clip. “And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive.”
Random people are flashed across the screen in the minute 30 second clip, including a poet parked on a street in New Orleans, a random woman getting highlights in a salon, hands on a pregnant belly, people dancing in the rain, a child being hoisted into the air, and a sky filled with rotating stars.
“And finally you would dream where you are now,” the clip concludes.
Lively, in her editor’s letter, wrote that the idea behind her new site—a “part magazine, part e-commerce hub, [and] part philanthropic endeavor”—was that “everyone has a story to tell.” She mused, “Here at Preserve, there are people, stories, essays, videos, and goods that hopefully inspire your home, your style, and your tongue… There’s expensive stuff. Inexpensive stuff. And everything in between. But their value, that’s up to you. We romanticize it, calling it treasure. What we’re simply saying is that we see their worth on every level.”
Watch the introductory clip here and tell Us: What do you think?
