THE LOOK: MR CHACE CRAWFORD!

For more than five years he has played one of the male leads on Gossip Girl - the sometimes-outlandish drama about a group of sexed-up Upper East Side rich kids, and maybe the most visible relic of pre-recession New York excess still on TV today. After six seasons as one of TV's most talked-about shows, Gossip Girl is now coming to an end. And only a couple of days before MR PORTER spoke to him, Mr Crawford, who plays the much-lusted after Nate Archibald, was wrapping the final episode.

"It was a surreal experience," he says about his last scene with co-stars Ms Blake Lively, Mr Ed Westwick, Mr Penn Badgley and Ms Leighton Meester. "Like leaving college, just without a degree."

Born in Texas, Mr Crawford spent the first couple of years of his life moving around the central US while his father finished his training as a dermatologist. It's possibly why, today, he prefers the quiet of New York's financial district to the hustle and bustle uptown. "I was worried I wouldn't like it at first because it's too quiet," he says about the high-rise apartment he's lived in for the past three years. "But now I absolutely love it. You're isolated, and because you're high up you feel as if you're out of the city."

His upcoming projects tell the same story. On one hand his first post-Gossip Girl film is going to be the commercial romantic comedy Responsible Adult, which also stars Ms Katie Holmes, and is a safe next step for someone who has spent the past half-decade as a teen idol. But on the other, there has also been serious speculation he's going to play sadistic businessmen Christian Grey in the film adaptation of the blockbuster erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. A risqué choice, but one that could do for him what American Psycho did for former child actor and now Oscar winner Mr Christian Bale. 

"I'm a huge fan of that movie actually" Mr Crawford reveals, as our time winds up and he heads off to swap his green windbreaker for what I later see in the pictures from his event was a sleek, black three-piece suit. An intentionally Patrick Bateman-esque choice? Maybe.

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