Don’t get it twisted! Blake Lively took to Instagram on Saturday, May 21, to poke fun at herself for the comparisons fans have been drawing between her Cannes Film Festival looks and certain iconic Disney princesses.
“Everyone thinks I was inspired by the princesses. If they only knew…” she captioned a shot of herself making an exaggerated face while holding up a screenshot of Little Mermaid villain Ursula.
Lively, 28, has stepped out on the red carpet in a number of gorgeous, flowing gowns over the past week that look oddly reminiscent of Disney princesses ranging from Frozen’s Elsa to Cinderella.
Her latest look, a gold curve-hugging Atelier Versace gown that shows off her growing baby bump, made headlines for a different reason, however.
The Gossip Girl alum paired a split-screen shot of herself with the lyrics to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” — “L.A. face with an Oakland booty” — and received a deluge of backlash from fans who considered her comment racially insensitive.
“Unbelievably problematic,” one commenter wrote of Lively’s caption, “using women of color’s bodies as a joke. I guess you just want people to know you’re racist and you don’t give a s–t.”
But Sir Mix-a-Lot jumped to Lively’s defense in a powerful op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter several days later.
“A friend of mine, he said, ‘Dude, I know Katy Perry did this, one of the Kardashians did this, but I don’t understand, what did this girl do to make everybody pissed off?’” he wrote in the essay. “So I checked it out, and looked at it and I was kind of … I liked it.”
The ’90s artist added that he originally penned the 1992 smash hit as a way to appreciate women with curvier figures.
“For [Blake] to look at her butt and that little waist and to say, ‘L.A. face with an Oakland booty,’ doesn’t that mean that the norm has changed, that the beautiful people have accepted our idea of beautiful? That’s the way I took it,” he wrote. “I think now not only is it accepted, but it’s expected.”
