What Chace Crawford Can’t Live Without

I’ve had this mug since probably 2016. My girlfriend at the time got it for me as one of my first gifts. I was like, “Oh, thank you. I’m not gonna really use this thing.” Now I use it all the time. I’ve had it for almost ten years and I bring it to set. There are a couple scratches in there, a couple love scratches. But that thing, you could run over it with a car and you’re gonna be fine. I bring it with me when I travel, especially Toronto. The best coffee shop in Toronto is called Ethica Coffee Roasters, right down the street from me. Their stuff is so good, and those are the only beans I buy. I like to do a pour-over a lot of time and then pour it into that Zojirushi. I’m a little bit of a coffee snob, so I make my own.

My dad is a dermatologist, but he never gives me any good skin tips. The one thing he did was give us this. We used to live in Texas, where we’d be in the heat, and we lived in north Minnesota for a few years, where the winters are really dry. So if my nose is dry or if I’ve been sick or whatever, I’ll just put it straight up. I swear it fixes everything — lips, cracked cuticles, whatever. But generally, I don’t really use any lip balm or anything. I’ll just put that on. I saw that it comes in a big tub, but I use the squeeze bottle. It’s better for traveling. And then I have a tiny version too. I’ll have it in my pocket, just in case.

Again, my dad doesn’t give me any tips. He’s like, “Wear sunscreen.” And now, I’m 40 this year. He’s like, “You should probably keep your face out of the sun.” Now I’m like, “Oh my God.” So you just put it on your face, especially right now in the summer. But I toe the line of getting a little sunshine first thing in the morning, like 10, 15 minutes with no sunscreen. I’ll put some on for golf or outdoor stuff as well. I like the clear. It doesn’t get messy and all over your hands.

I don’t have this unshakable, unbreakable morning routine and my entire world falls apart, but there’s an exercise in a specific acting class I learned years ago that’s more like expressive writing. It’s like The Artist’s Way, Julie Cameron’s book, where it’s sort of stream of consciousness. You don’t stop. It’s called the morning pages, doing three full pages, handwritten. So I tweaked it. I do that, and then I’ll try to do 20 minutes of a brain dump, like an expressive writing thing. And then I try to do a ten-minute meditation right after. If I can’t get to it in the morning or I miss a day, it’s not a big deal. But if I can get to it sometime throughout the day, even at the end of the day, I’ve noticed it has been a big thing for me. And then what you do after you fill up the book is you burn it, or you shred it, or you toss it away, which is kind of a nice, cathartic thing. No one ever has to read it. My handwriting is almost illegible because I’m just free-flowing. But I found it’s a really nice thing, and it works to help with expressing whatever it is. Trust me, we need to get it out on a page. I’ve probably gone through about 15 of them. It doesn’t take that long to go through doing three pages a day.

Fashion for men has changed since I did Gossip Girl back in the 2000s. It was always: What suit color are you gonna wear? Or: What tie color are you gonna change? Now it’s all different. I like the classic Paul Newman–, Steve McQueen–type stuff, with the nice T-shirt and jeans. And being from Texas, it’s more simple for me, so I wear T-shirts all the time.

American Dream Clubhouse came about at a time in my life when we’d finished filming season four of The Boys. I had some projects lined up, and then the strikes hit. Everything really slowed down, and I started having these weird pandemic vibes again. I was like, “This isn’t great. I need to focus my energy into a different creative direction.” So it started out as T-shirts. I wanted to find some that didn’t fall apart in the wash after three washes. I was buying these expensive T-shirts, and I’m like, Why? These are just terrible quality. The line grew from there. We wanted to obviously be very under-logo’d, very understated. You could throw a sport coat over it and tuck it in and wear it out to dinner. You can work out in this thing. It’s a nice blend of materials. Honestly, it was just a nice relief to be focused on something outside of the TV, film, acting, entertainment world. I’m not Johnny Fashion. I wasn’t trying to create something that was inaccessible. I wanted to create high-quality stuff, stuff that could help the average guy level up a little bit, even if he doesn’t want to take hours a day figuring out what he’s gonna wear.