Blake Lively Called In More Than 200 Looks For Her Press Tour – Then Tried Them All on Her Sister Before Picking Her Top 20!

Just last week, our motto was “another hour, another Blake Lively outfit.” Now it’s been six days, and. .. nothing. Silence on the Blake Lively fashion front. Considering that she changed nearly a dozen times on Tuesday alone, we think she earned well-deserved break from playing dress-up. But that didn’t stop us from asking her how she pulled off more than 15 outfits in 72 hours without a stylist (while juggling parenting a 4-month-old) — and we’ve got the scoop in this week’s PEOPLE.

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“Once upon a time, this was supposed to be a two-week press trip,” Lively tells PEOPLE of her whirlwind week promoting The Age of Adaline. “But then life happened, and I had a baby, and suddenly I needed to condense two weeks of promotional appearances into two days. Seriously: two days. So I changed the timeline, just not the wardrobe.” Just to break that down, she kicked off the week with two outfit changes Sunday, wore 11 outfits on Wednesday (and changed seven times in only five hours) and then three on Thursday. Her formal appearances were mostly done by Friday, when she wore just three much more casual looks.

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Basically, it took two months for her to put together her ensembles (which ended up totaling more than $10 million — and that’s in jewelry alone). “I started planning for this back in February. I selected easily over 500 looks from Style.com, various runways and even some past collections. I wound up calling in 256 outfits,” she reveals. “If I had a stylist I’d just book one whole day of fittings, but instead I had to cram it in wherever I could. And in the end, I couldn’t even do all of it.”

RELATED PHOTOS: Every gorgeous look from Blake Lively’s Age of Adaline tour!

So she turned to her sister Robyn Lively, 43, for help. “My sister is the same size as I am, so I said to her: ‘Okay, you’re my fit model now! You try on half, and I’ll try on half! Go!’ If it looked good on her, I just assumed it would look good on me. So some of the stuff I’d never even really tried on myself!”

Blake, can we be your next red carpet guinea pigs?

And do you volunteer? Tell us below!

–Catherine Kast, with reporting by Kate Coyne