Stylist Kate Young tells VF all about the art of celebrity dressing—including its backend deals and its do’s and don’ts
Can a great dress help an actress win an Oscar? Stylist Kate Young has the answer to that age old question. Young is the stylist behind Rose Byrne, Dakota Johnson, Michelle Williams, and many other Hollywood stars.
She worked at Vogue, first as an assistant, eventually becoming sittings editor, and had a prolific run styling magazine editorials prior to making celebrities her sole focus. “I want to look at my client and be like, ‘that’s the chicest woman ever!’” she says of her approach, which is fashion-first rather than movie-based. This explains why you haven’t seen any of her clients embrace “method dressing,” and why you’ll find them wearing runway samples more often than custom dresses. Young has seen it all when it comes to fashion, and has been at the center of the styling industry as it’s taken on new shape over the past decade. Some things that have expanded or shrunk since she’s gone into the business: Brand deals , budgets , and the public’s interest in celebrity dressing . Before social media, most people could not quite name someone’s stylist—bar a few exceptions like celebrities who dressed others, say, Rachel Zoe or even Kim Kardashian. Today faceless profiles and influencers alike have made it their business—and in some cases their profession—to analyze what famous people wear and why, and nowadays it always goes back to the stylist. I recently spoke with Young about styling today with the proliferation of brand deals and the painful reality of smaller studio budgets. Read our conversation below. You’re an OG in the stylist game—what do you make of the landscape of styling right now? The thing that’s changed more than anything is the way brands function with VIP and stylists. It has changed dramatically post COVID, and I think it’s really changing right now too with all the new regimes. Every house with a new designer is getting a new VIP team, which means they’re getting a new strategy. Brands now have these hard and fast lists, but before you used to be able to kind of hustle someone at a brand to trust you based on a personal relationship. It was a personal decision of a VIP PR person with a stylist in that relationship to lend them something for a client or not. That is disappearing, I would say. Now, so much is on contract and predetermined. People are really laser focused on their celebrity placements in a way they didn’t used to be. I mean, there’s also the famous stylist thing that I feel like has been going on forever, and that was Rachel Zoe. The point you make about brands is interesting, because it carries into editorial—who magazines can photograph wearing what. Right, it’s always “she has a contract.” I don’t know how politically correct this is to say, but the reality is that brands are who hold the purse strings right now. When I started doing this, movie companies paid. I would make money doing a press tour, and now I am paid less for the same work than I was 15 years ago. And production companies now really rely on movie stars having brand deals to subsidize this. I think that’s even true with magazines. I don’t know whether you all want to admit it. We talk so much in this industry about the decline of luxury, but in fact, who has money? Dior and Louis Vuitton and Chanel. Movie companies aren’t making the money anymore. Magazines aren’t making the money anymore. Even celebrities, to a certain degree, aren’t making the kind of money making movies that they make from brand deals. I think really, you can just follow the money to see where the industry’s changed. Sorry, that’s not a very glamorous take. It’s not, but it is the take. It’s why this conversation series exists—people have questions and you have answers. As we keep talking about brand ambassadors and deals, what’s it like to work with someone who doesn’t have one? Has it become harder, or is it more fun? No, it’s so fun. It’s really fun to have freedom. I was doing a lot of editorial up until not that long ago still just because I liked it, I come from that and I love doing photo shoots, but I was doing this editorial with a cover and had the run through and the editor in chief said to me, “okay, so you’re going to shoot this for the cover and this inside and you have to shoot these.” I had a sheet with the jewelry that needed a full page and a sheet with the accessories, and I was like, this is a catalog, so what do you need me for? And if I shoot a catalogue, I don’t do it for $250 a day. I actually walked off the shoot, which is I think one of the only times I ever have. But I knew this actress and we had been friends for years. She wasn’t a regular client, but she was somebody I know who asked for me because she trusted my vision. I also didn’t work at this magazine, so there’s nothing in it for me to shoot X, Y, and Z. I didn’t think it was good for my brand to show up with this rack of advertisers and tell her what she had to wear when it didn’t align with my taste. I really liked being a celebrity stylist because I didn’t have any advertisers to answer to. I could just do whatever I liked and that has gone away a lot of the time now. If somebody is a brand ambassador, not only are they tethered to one brand for big events, but there’s a list of things they are not allowed to wear or touch in public, and that list can basically be the list of brands that have runway shows. It can be so extreme. Sometimes limitations make you more creative. But then you see some young celebrity who doesn’t have a contract yet and they’re wearing The Row, and it’s like, “oh, I’m so jealous. I can also do that. I can make someone look that good except they’re not allowed,” and that sucks. It’s a bummer when the public has an opinion on what you’re doing and thinks that you’re choosing everything, when in fact your choices are so limited. I think that there are a lot of nuances behind styling that the public doesn’t quite grasp. And it’s not that they should, no one’s told them. I think the vast majority of people still believe that celebrities buy clothes and own the clothes that they’re wearing, that they have some epic closet full of all these gowns and stuff. I sometimes see comments on Instagram like, “oh, he’s rich now he can get that Saint Laurent.” And I’m like, “he didn’t pay for that.” Just a fundamental misunderstanding of the system. When you do work with someone who’s not contracted, what’s your strategy around that? I don’t love custom dresses. I know that’s very crazy for a stylist to say, but I really prefer to use dresses designed by designers and not by me. I will always, always prefer to use existing samples or runway, and even when I do custom, I like it to be based on the runway. I don’t like it when Hollywood clothes exist independent from what the brand is. I just don’t understand where it makes any sense to do a rubber purple dress when you are known for beige cashmere because the stylist asks for it. I do think it’s kind of genius how some stylists do that and their client basically wears the same dress to everything by various designers, and you get a very clear brand image of that celebrity, but it’s not my thing. I like fashion. I always think of it like we’re shooting an editorial on runway to reality. How are we making this cool? I want it to be representative of what is in the zeitgeist and how a real woman would wear it. People online have become obsessed with talking about celebrity style. It was always a thing, but now it’s all over social media. What do you make of this? I think the loud group on social media is maybe not the audience who is in fact educated about real fashion or consuming real fashion. They’re skilled consumers of pop culture imagery on the internet. And so it is really hard for me to reconcile it because I have to do what I like. I know a lot about clothes and my eye is educated, and there are people I really admire and respect who look really great, who the internet does not care about. And there are people who wear really, really bad clothes to my eye, who the internet loves. I just think, what’s the goal here? If you are trying to be an influencer or a model or something, then that’s actually a good goal. You want as much of that noise as possible on social media. But if you’re trying to win an Oscar or get in the next Oscar-winning movie, I don’t know if it is. But I think times are changing, and maybe you do need that noise. Maybe Marty Supreme succeeded because he’s dating a Kardashian. I think it’s all shifting, and my take on it needs to shift too, maybe. As an audience, I think both things can be true. I think that the social media clout can be a vehicle for some, or the lack of it can also be beneficial in a way for others. I do love the tricks sometimes, they’re fun. The pierced nips at the Grammys , I’m so into it. Everyone’s going to go around naked, and this is ultimate and it’s real fashion. And I think she looked beautiful. I think her makeup was amazing. I think it captured the imagination. I love that. Everybody hated it. To me, that was a massive success. Speaking of tricks—how do you feel about “method dressing”? That is the truest of styling tricks for the internet. I hate it . I’m just like, if I wanted to do costume, I would’ve done costume. I like fashion. We’re back to what I said before about clothes that relate to a runway that were designed by an artist with a vision of what modernity is. That’s that. I don’t love the Met Ball. I’ve rarely done a great Met Ball. I’m not somebody who’s like, “and then it’s going to light up!” I don’t do that shit. I think that’s stupid. I don’t ever want people to look at my client and be like, “holy shit.” I want them to look at my client and be like, “that’s the chicest woman ever.” I don’t think costumes usually achieve that. I like what you’re doing with Rose Byrne. She looks terrific. I loved that green Chanel dress at the Golden Globes, or the Celine dress last year at the Academy Museum gala. Thanks so much. I love her so much. And she’s so easy to dress with that line. I was at that Celine show and that car ride back to Paris was like an hour. I was texting the PR like “listen, I really want that leopard kaftan. I know you’re going to say it’s too soon and blah, blah, blah. But the Academy Gala is going to be a runway report, and you’re not going to be able to give this to anybody else. Rose is tall and she’s flat chested, and she’s built like a model and it’s not going to work on anybody else, so just give it to me.” And they did. You mentioned dressing someone to win an Oscar, which is fascinating to me. How do you dress someone to win an Oscar, or position them for that kind of exposure? I feel like I don’t know that the clothes actually have anything to do with it, but I do think that when you’re doing this and you have a client who’s on a run and is going to go to every one of these awards shows, the reality is that the people voting for the Oscars are watching. So your audience is not just the internet chatter, it’s actually the people who are hiring these actors for their next job. I think the goal is to make someone seem fascinating. You want them to seem clever and stylish and kind of magical. They kind of already are, if they’re in a movie that got nominated, but there’s a way that you can build a costume for them to be in, build a persona that they can play the part of the most fascinating person, and I love that. They also need to look really elevated. There’s definitely the politics of brands—you want them in big brands. The other thing that is important to think about is the big huge powerhouse brands have big, huge powerhouse PR that advertise in all the publications. So when someone wears Louis Vuitton, they’re going to get a lot more press than they’re going to get if they wear, I don’t know, who’s the dress designer down the road? It can be really pretty, but they don’t have 42 press offices around the world pumping that to local newspapers, and magazines. That just makes a difference in an actor’s campaign. Right. I mean, I get those pitches of who is wearing a big brand to which awards show. The brands hire photographers and glam and everyone involved for these stories. Yes, so you get a BTS photographer, you get extra, extra care. They have money, so you get to have three fittings with tailors who come in. The person who made the dress from Paris flies in and makes sure it’s perfect. It’s not like me, with my guy who used to work in a dry cleaner doing a hem. You get perfection. And you also get multiple people engaged in making this the most press worthy moment. I like doing shoots with models, but I always liked doing the shoots with the celebrities better. It’s super interesting to me how fashion actually works on real people. Actors are more perfect than the average person, they’re way more beautiful and attractive, but they’re also not models. Models are like hangers. You put something on, it looks great, and they can be whatever you need them to be. Their job is to not have opinions. But actors do. People have the weirdest fashion quirks like, “oh, I don’t wear pants that don’t have pockets on the butt.” There are just weird things that people have that I find really interesting, and I think fashion people sometimes forget that stuff. That’s why a lot of fashion doesn’t make sense.
Hollywood Red Carpet Kate Young
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
New Game Of Thrones Show Finally Tells The Truth About Targaryen MadnessAngel Shaw is a New TV Lead Writer with ScreenRant who knows far too much about the worlds of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.
Read more »
Iranian regime pressures families of slain protesters to bury truth of crackdownAmirhossein Saedi’s father had urged him to stay home. The protests sweeping Iran were growing more dangerous by the day, and the 19-year-old computer science student was still recovering from illness.
Read more »
The Truth About Compounded GLP-1 DrugsSenior Editor, HealthyWomenJacquelyne Froeber is an award-winning journalist and editor. She holds a BA in journalism from Michigan State University. She is the former editor-in-chief of Celebrated Living magazine and has editing and writing experience for print and online publications, including Health magazine, Coastal Living magazine and AARP.
Read more »
The saucy truth about America’s hot sauceAmazing America’s Luke Morris takes us inside the factory to uncover some hidden history about America's hot sauce.
Read more »
Democrats Demand Trump Is Deposed on Epstein ImmediatelyLawmakers claim Republicans are hiding the truth about the child predator’s lofty connections.
Read more »
Harry Styles Responds To Hair Transplant RumorsSo, what's the truth?
Read more »