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 …

Alright … so we know that Blake Lively and Penn Badgley, co-stars on Gossip Girl, are romantically involved in real life (you may recall the couple were spotted canoodling while on vacay together in Mexico last month) and that their on-screen characters, Serena van der Woodsen and Dan Humphrey, used to be an item on the show … but the season finale left their romance in doubt. Here are a couple pics of Blake/Serena and Penn/Dan kissing pretty hardcore on the Tilden Beach set of Gossip Girl (currently filming here in NY this week) yesterday afternoon:

Is it fake kissing? Is it real kissing? Does it matter since Penn‘s shirt is wide open and he’s showing off his happy trail? HMMM … looks like a fun job, whatever is really going on.

[Photo credit: INFdaily]

While summer vacation is just getting started for many folks, it’s back to work time for the cast of Gossip Girl. Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick have all convened in the Hamptons, NY to begin shooting scenes for the second season of Gossip Girl, scheduled to debut on The CW this September 1. Here are a few pics of the Gossip Girl ladies (and Penn Badgley) hanging out backstage by the trailers on set yesterday afternoon:

It’s unclear if Blake and Penn are having themselves a lovers’ spat or if they’re just exchanging pleasantries (or if Penn is annoyed that Blake is making fun of him for wearing his haircutting smock in public) but I understand that things are still going well for these two lovebirds. I’m not sure what’s going on with those jean shorts that Leighton is wearing … they give her a bit of a mom’s butt, hopefully it’s not an outfit she’ll be wearing on the show. Yeah, there ain’t all that much sexy going on in these pics … for the hatwness, we turn to Gossip boys Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick …

Newish couple Blake Lively and Penn Badgely were spotted enjoying a lovely afternoon together in NYC this week. The pair gloomily skulked in the streets of SoHo, scowling at all the attention from the photogs who were taking their photographs:

Photo credit: INFdaily and Splash NewsClearly, the couple don’t look all that thrilled that folks are paying them mind … which totally baffles me. Why work so hard to attain fame and then get pissed off when you get it. I get that celebs might not always be in the mood to have their photo taken and they might not be in the mood to smile all of the time but I don’t know that it’s a good idea for newborn celebs like BlakeLey (PennLey?) to lok all pissy this early into their career. Gossip Girl can use all the help in the ratings that they can get … it might be wise for the couple to at least feign happiness once in a while. They make a great couple … I’d hate for them to start turning into a miserable couple. [Source, Source]