So Sarah Michelle Gellar is out doing press for her new Paramount+ show Wolf Pack right now, and naturally every single interviewer is asking her about Buffy. Which, fair enough — we’re all going to be asking her about Buffy until the end of time, and she seems genuinely okay with that these days.
In a video she did with Who What Wear going through her most iconic looks, someone asked whether she kept anything from the Buffy set. And yes. Yes she did. The boots.
If you were a fan of the show you know exactly which boots we’re talking about — the ones that basically signalled to the audience that things were about to get serious. As SMG put it herself: “When the boots went on, you know the fighting was going to happen.” She says she still has a pair at home, and she still fits into them, which is both impressive and extremely on-brand for someone who spent seven years doing their own stunts.
She did mention one small tragedy though — at some point a costume designer sent a pair of the original boots off for a fashion shoot, and they never made it back to set. Gone forever. A loss we’re all going to have to sit with.
Beyond the boots, she got pretty thoughtful about Buffy’s wardrobe in general, which honestly doesn’t get talked about enough. The costuming on that show was doing a lot of heavy lifting narratively — early Buffy is all pastels and crop tops, very “California girl who definitely doesn’t want to be the chosen one,” and then as the seasons go on and she grows into her power, everything shifts. It wasn’t accidental. Gellar made the point that Buffy was one of the first female action heroes who didn’t have to dress down or look tough to be taken seriously — she could wear something completely fashionable and still absolutely wreck a vampire. Which is kind of the whole point of the character, isn’t it?
She also touched briefly on the less comfortable side of the Buffy legacy — the toxic set environment that’s been well documented over the past couple of years following Charisma Carpenter’s statement and the wider conversations around Joss Whedon. Gellar has been pretty consistent in how she talks about it: she’s proud of what the cast created, she’s not going to pretend the working environment was okay, and she hopes the show’s legacy belongs to the people who actually made it what it was. That feels about right.
Anyway. The boots are safe. They’re in her house. That’s the news and it’s good news.
Wolf Pack is now streaming on Paramount+.
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