Blake Lively reveals the story behind viral Baby Spice photo
Blake Lively is now regarded as a style icon — but when she was 11 years old, she took her fashion cues from the Spice Girls. In the late ‘90s, young Lively attended a Spiceworld Tour concert in San Bernardino, Calif., dressed head to toe as Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice. That moment would have been lost to history if not for a photo tweeted this month by a California woman named Bria Madrid. As a little girl at her first concert, Madrid posed for a photo with someone she thought was Baby Spice … only to realize later that it was actually a tween Blake Lively. Naturally, the internet went crazy, especially when both Lively and Bunton commented on the pic. Yahoo Entertainment spoke to Lively in advance of her suburban thriller A Simple Favor and got the full story behind the Baby Spice photo (and those amazing platform shoes). Watch the interview above.
My secret is out… https://t.co/mFnEucJyHb
— Blake Lively (@blakelively) August 4, 2018
“My mom made that dress, actually,” Lively told Yahoo Entertainment. “And then I got the platform shoes, which was a huge thing, because I got good grades that year. I had the Baby Spice necklace. And I was so flattered, because I remember some little girl who was much younger than me asked to take a picture, because she thought I was Baby Spice.”
At the time, Lively said, she had “no aspirations” to be an actress, but loved the feeling of being “recognized for being someone I wasn’t” — a feeling she would get used to ten years later, when she began playing Serena van Der Woodsen on the hit teen drama Gossip Girl. (Side note: Although Lively and Madrid identified the concert year in their tweets as 1997, the Spiceworld Tour came to San Bernardino in the summer of 1998.)
A Simple Favor, co-starring Anna Kendrick and Henry Golding and directed by Paul Feig, opens in theaters on Sept. 14.
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