ONTD

In our annual salute to the clothes that will help you weather the brisk months ahead, actor Ed Westwick reaches for the pieces that embrace timeless style and construction. Because the best gear shouldn’t last just one season but a lifetime.

*****

On the first-ever episode of the outrageously hyped television sensation Gossip Girl, Ed Westwick’s character, Chuck Bass, bookended a pair of date-rape scenes with a weed reference and the memorable zinger—delivered to the show’s principal, Serena—“Your life is over, slut!”

“Villain is such a harsh word,” Westwick says from a hotel room in Washington, D.C., where he has just attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s hard to imagine what a recently minted 22-year-old television antagonist from England was doing pressing the flesh with Beltway muckrackers. But Westwick, who looks like Jude Law crossed with a pre-psychotropic-meltdown Joaquin Phoenix, assures us in his assured British way that “everyone who is anyone was there.”

If that makes Westwick sound like a bit of a dick, surrender now—it’s part of his appeal. Just ask Gossip Girl’s freakishly wide-ranging demographic of religious watchers, many of whom are as entertained by the incestuous nature of the cast as by the show itself. Westwick dates co-star Jessica Szohr (they played kissy face at our shoot) and is roommates (cute!) with Chace Crawford. When pushed to dish, Westwick minimizes the thin line between work and play, and fair enough. You’d date a co-worker if she looked like Jessica Szohr.

Still, is there a downside to all that Gossip glare? What happens when TV’s latest prep-school bad boy tours Arlington Cemetery with his real-life parents? “Every time the tram would stop, these girls would come up, giggle, then run off,” Westwick says. “You feel like the kid in school that everyone’s laughing at.”—will welch