She goes by many names: There’s Lily van der Woodsen, the slightly tortured, oft-married but deeply devoted mother on the mid-aughts hit show Gossip Girl. Then there’s “Mom,” which is what her two real-life kids, Hermés, 17, and Helena, 15, call her. There’s also “The Mother,” a term of endearment and respect bestowed upon her by the internet for her iconic style, as well as “Birkin Mom,” an homage to her storied collection of Hermès Birkin bags. And then, of course, there’s her real name: Kelly Rutherford.
Rutherford is carrying another one of those Hermès bags—a black leather Constance bag with gold hardware—when she arrives at the Maison Delano hotel in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement for our interview in mid-May, dressed in an Aspesi raincoat, a simple white Hanro T-shirt, black Massimo Dutti slingbacks, and a black faux leather Munthe skirt with floral cutouts. Her hair is pulled back in a simple chignon, and she exudes the casual, natural beauty typically attributed exclusively to the French. She orders a cappuccino (regular milk!) and settles in to discuss her life as an actress, style influencer, mother, and “The Mother.”
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“I like ‘The Mother,’” Rutherford says of her online nicknames. “Like when people call you ‘The Mother,’ there couldn’t be a bigger, better thing for me. I think it’s beautiful. It’s the highest compliment. And so I think that ‘Birkin Mom’ is always so cute.”
How does one become the internet’s Mother? As with most things online, it starts with a selfie. For the past few years, Rutherford has been consistently posting photos of her outfits to Instagram, many of which are taken in the mirror of the small, beige-tiled elevator of her apartment building. The photos are low-key, unpretentious, even cozy, with an understated chicness—they show her dressed in oversize matching separates and a complementary pair of sunglasses; in well-cut jeans and blouses from her favorite independent designers; in an all-cream sweater-and-dress ensemble, posing with the stroller she was using to walk her dog, Twombly (a Libra, named after artist Cy Twombly), who was recovering from surgery. (Her other dog, Cappuccina, is a Taurus.)
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“It started with the mirror in my building, just going to get coffee with the dogs,” she explains. “It was not so intentional of, ‘Oh, I’m going to start taking pictures in an elevator.’ Honestly, the reason I do it nowadays is it’s convenient. I know the lighting, it’s easy, I’m in and out of that elevator, and I thought: ‘This is the perfect little light box.’”
Rutherford’s daughter Helena acted as her Gen Z technical adviser. “When I first started doing the mirror selfies, she’d come in with me, and she’d be like, ‘Mom, you’re totally holding the phone wrong. Do it like this,’” Rutherford says, explaining that Helena taught her to hold her phone more to the side versus right in front of her face. “She was just helping me get it to where I didn’t look completely ridiculous.”
The Instagram selfies showcasing Rutherford’s style have struck a chord, particularly with Gen Z fashion fans on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, who create tributes to her aesthetic and fawn over her collection of handbags. In one TikTok video, a montage of paparazzi photos of Rutherford with several different Birkins, the caption declares that she’s “the original Birkin mom <3.” It’s been viewed more than 3.1 million times.
In meme trend-speak, Rutherford’s personal aesthetic lands somewhere between “coastal grandmother” and “quiet luxury,” but with a distinctly European twist. This is not Sofia Richie Grainge’s SoCal interpretation of effortless wealth, though of course Rutherford did grow up in Newport Beach, California. There is something more old-world and refined about her self-presentation, even if the way Rutherford communicates her style—through selfies posted to Instagram—couldn’t be more modern (or, for that matter, new money). Comfort is key, but not in an athleisure way—this is Paris, after all.
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Rutherford counts actresses Grace Kelly and Catherine Deneuve as two of her earliest style icons, and says it was through watching their films that she first fell in love with the European lifestyle, particularly in Italy and France. “I love all of Europe, you know, and obviously, I’ve been coming to France so much, and I feel very at home here and have friends here.” Based primarily between the U.S. and Monaco, Rutherford doesn’t really call any one place home. But you know what they say: Home is where the selfie elevator is.
“Everyone in the building knows that I do it,” Rutherford says, laughing. “So now they take pictures of themselves and send them to me. The other day, my neighbor said, ‘Oh, by the way, the elevator’s broken, I thought you should know they’re fixing it.’ I thought: ‘Oh, good, it’ll be fixed by the time I get back.’”
Born in Kentucky and raised in California, Rutherford moved to New York as a teenager to pursue acting and modeling. She got her start on the soap Generations, but her breakout role came in 1996, when she was cast as Megan Lewis, a sex worker with a tragic past, on the hit ’90s prime-time soap opera Melrose Place. The show was 32 episodes a season, which meant Rutherford and her castmates would film two episodes at a time, a grueling work schedule for any young actor.
“I remember thinking, ‘I’ve just got to get myself something really nice,’” Rutherford says. “At the end of this, you know, it’s sort of like the carrot—you’re just like, ‘What’s going to be my thing at that time that I’m going to do for myself to get me through this schedule?’”
That “something really nice” ended up being her first-ever Hermès purchase: a black 28 Kelly bag with gold hardware.
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“I remember it was a little store in Beverly Hills, and these little ladies were there with their gloves, and they would come in and it was before they even did fashion,” Rutherford says of her Hermès shopping experience. “It was just the horse stuff and the bags and a few watches.”
Always ahead of the curve, “It was before any of my friends were wearing them, and no one I knew was buying Hermès at that time,” she adds. “My friends were wearing these other bags and they would go buy more of them, but I would just go buy the one bag because it was so expensive. I would rather have one Hermès and keep it than have three of those. And that’s kind of how I built my collection: I would treat myself at the end of each season to a bag.”
After Melrose Place ended in 1999, Rutherford had recurring roles in three short-lived TV series and acted in several movies before 2007, when she landed the part on Gossip Girl that she would eventually become best-known for: Lily van der Woodsen, mom of the show’s main It Girl, Serena.
From the beginning, Rutherford says she had a “real vision” for her character—an old-money type who embodied the quiet luxury TikTok aesthetic nearly a decade before TikTok aesthetics were even a thing. Eric Daman, who had done costumes for another fashionable TV hit, Sex and the City, was the head of Gossip Girl’s costume department and worked with Rutherford to express Lily van der Woodsen’s persona through her visual presentation.
I’m in and out of that elevator, and I thought: ‘This is the perfect little light box.’”
“I just wanted to really land her on the Upper East Side,” Rutherford says. “So I said, ‘Can you reach out to Van Cleef & Arpels, can you reach out to Verdura, can you reach out to Pomellato?’—you know, all these places for jewelry and things like that.”
At the time, “Hermès was obviously Hermès, but not everyone was wearing it,” Rutherford explains, which—in the beginning, before the show gained popularity—made it harder to get for the show. So instead, especially in earlier seasons, she ended up using some of her own clothes and bags to complete Lily’s look.
Though Rutherford isn’t herself from the Upper East Side, she had an innate sense of what was required from her character, in terms of both personality and personal style. “I think I have a very entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “I’m a very curious person. I’ve always loved style that was timeless, that was just classic and beautiful. And that’s why the Upper East Side makes sense, because that’s kind of what it was.”
Meredith Markworth-Pollack, Daman’s assistant costume designer on the show, also worked closely with Rutherford (as well as on the Dynasty reboot a decade later). “I just remember her coming in, just incredibly elegant,” Markworth-Pollack says. “I think if there was one word to describe Kelly, it would be elegance. And she was always kind of effortlessly put together, with definitely a European sense of style. And that spilled over into her character, because it felt very fitting for Lily, and it felt that Kelly was able to bring this kind of sophisticated sense of style to her and to the show.”
Though Gossip Girl has been off the air since 2012, its influence endures. In 2021, HBO Max attempted a reboot of the show with all-new characters, but it only lasted two seasons, failing to take root in the cultural psyche the way the original series did. But the reboot did help, at least in part, to introduce Gossip Girl to a new audience of fashion-obsessed, internet-savvy fans, who were too young to watch the original show when it debuted. Currently available to stream, the OG Gossip Girl proved a fun and easy binge, particularly during the COVID era, when new television programming was difficult to come by. Now the majority of Rutherford’s fashion fans on social media seem to be younger, with a distinct nostalgia for the TV shows and style of the olden days (er, 17 years ago).
“I do wish they would bring it back, so then we would know,” Rutherford says, sipping her cappuccino, when I asked if she thought 2024 Lily van der Woodsen would take an influencer route similar to hers. Well, they did the reboot, I offer. “Yeah, but they didn’t do a continuation of what we were doing. They did everything else except the thing that was most successful, that everyone wants to see.”
I believe that we’re infinite, multidimensional, and we can do so many things. And I think that’s the fun part of life.”
But Rutherford’s career is doing just fine without a reprise of her Gossip Girl role. In addition to her burgeoning influencer status, she recently appeared in the French TV series Escort Boys and is working on creating a website that will allow her to curate and recommend products from her favorite up-and-coming brands. She sees it as an extension of her Instagram following, a way for her to celebrate the designers she loves and help bring them to a new audience. “I’m just trying to weave it in, all of it,” she says. “I can do the acting and the fashion stuff. I believe that we’re infinite, multidimensional, and we can, you know, really do so many things. And I think that’s the fun part of life.”
For now, Rutherford is appreciating her resurgence as a TikTok style star among the Gen Z hordes. “People younger and cooler, for sure—I’m very thankful that they love [Gossip Girl] and that they’ve continued to watch,” she says. “It’s just such a blessing to have done a show and to have such a wonderful experience doing a show and then to have people continue to like it—it’s such a gift as an actor.”
This article was first seen on ELLE US.