Blake Lively reveals the story behind viral Baby Spice photo

Gwynne Watkins
·Writer, Yahoo Entertainment

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 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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