The young cast of Gossip Girl is featured in the August issue of Vanity Fair magazine wherein the mag pontificates on the state of Young Hollywood (as it is wont to do from time to time) and names the new members of the next wave of, what they call, Bright Young Hollywood (also on the list Johan Hill, Emma Stone, Josh Peck, the Jonas brothers and more). Here is the mag’s photo of the Gossip gang all decked in in their best designer finery, walking brazenly into the wind:

It’s been only five years since V.F. took a reading of Hollywood’s youthquake—featuring the likes of Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, and Shia LaBeouf—but the celebrity terrain has gotten rougher … As for the class of 2008 pictured in these pages, they inhabit a far more predatory media-parasite environment, a Grand Theft Auto of “gotcha,” which so far they’re handling with aplomb. Easy to track, hard to trap, they belong to the iGeneration, for whom texting and Twittering are as natural as popping orange Tic Tacs, inhabiting and trailing invisible clouds of information wherever they go in the digital eco-system, where online and off-line, real life and Second Life, overlap. Boundaries dissolve everywhere they turn their pretty heads. It’s a short, sharp hop from the wholesome happy perk of Disney’s Hannah Montana, whose Miley Cyrus can’t show a little bare shoulder without the world flipping its bonnet, to the spite-laced hangovers of the CW’s Gossip Girl, where decadence is in full Baudelairean flower. There, every Coach bag contains wanton secrets. Treachery and bitchery gleam from every compact mirror. Youth and beauty have their privileges, among them being the ability and agility to roll out into the hazy dawn following the squalors of the night before and still possess the throwaway glamour of a Bryan Ferry song. A fan craze and a critical fetish, Gossip Girl has hit the sweet spot of the Zeitgeist, the X mark where sex appeal and pop sociology intersect and the story lines hold an illusion of seamlessness, as if they sprang full-blown from the brow of Entertainment Weekly.

Uh huh. Yeah, this article has a whole lot of big words which, I assume, is meant to take the topic of being young, rich and famous in Hollywood and elevate it to something akin to a post graduate thesis. Under normal circumstances, I’d be down … but I had a hard time getting thru this article (which you can read in full HERE) without kinda wanting to die a little bit. I mean, I get it … you write for Vanity Fair, you can mix and mingle big words with up-to-the-second pop culture references with the best of them. It all reads just a smidge too seriously for me but … whatevs, I get it.

But just to keep the Gossip Girl love going, here are a few photos of the Gossip guys all grouped together in a new photoshoot, styled to within an inch of their lives:

After the jump, more photos of Chace Crawford (who, according to VF mag prefers the iPhone over the Blackberry), Penn Badgley (iPhone) and Ed Westwick (BlackBerry) individually from this same photoshoot …

Yeah, see … you don’t need a whole lotta words to truly understand why Gossip Girl is so popular with the kids these days. Props to Vanity Fair for highlighting the young pretties in the new issue but they should maybe leave the hard work to the folks at Tiger Beat?

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