Blake Lively poses outside the Crosby Hotel on August 18, 2018 in New York City.

Be it the Met Gala or a film premiere, Blake Lively is always one of the most, if not the number one, best dressed woman on any given red carpet. While designers flock to dress her, the 31-year-old actress has admitted it wasn’t always this way – and in fact, she used to lie about what she wore on the red carpet because she felt too embarrassed to admit it was a regular high-street look from the shops.

“I wore Forever 21 much longer than I admitted. I just started saying it was vintage because I was so shamed for it,” Lively told The Handmaid’s Tale actress Sydney Sweeney in an interview for InStyle. “For me, fashion is a form of self-expression. It also really takes me out of my comfort zone. One of the reasons I’m an actor is that I’m naturally very shy, so it’s liberating to dress up and pretend to be someone else.”

Lively certainly didn’t seem all that shy – or affected by sweat – when she wore six suits in as many days in New York City’s heatwave in August last year. The subway was basically melting and Lively attended every event – including the MTV VMAs – in a pant suit to resemble the high-powered, albeit enigmatic, businesswoman in her movie A Simple Favour. “The only way that I feel comfortable doing red carpets and interviews is when I adopt the same thing that I do when I’m acting, which is to play a character,” she said. “So when I’m going to a premiere, I think, who is that character? And I step into that. I still get knots in my stomach before red carpets. You just want to represent yourself properly, so that’s why I chose to style myself.”