When the celebrity stylist Kate Young was a teenager in the ’90s, she read Donna Tartt’s collegiate thriller The Secret History and became obsessed with the idea of owning a Montblanc pen, a luxury writing tool that today costs hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. “All the characters in it are coveting or writing with Montblanc pens, and I was like, ‘Mom, I need a Montblanc pen. Right away.’ And she was like, ‘No, you don’t, you’re in high school,’” she says. Young was taken with the idea of writing with a fountain pen in dark, bloody ink, though, and kept pestering her mother about it. She did get one in the end, as a graduation gift.
Young’s mind still works like this. “Even when something’s an internal or intellectual pursuit, I will cling on to the material signifiers in the story or in the art and seek them out,” she says. You can’t live in the world of The Secret History—which is probably for the best, considering the murder—but if you can acquire a certain pen, you might feel as though you’ve tapped into the novel’s ominous, rarified atmosphere. “I know we’re not supposed to be material,” Young says, “but somehow objects really fuel my interior life.”
That Young finds meaning in the material doesn’t come as a surprise. A former assistant to Anna Wintour and Tonne Goodman at Vogue, she’s spent the last 12-plus dressing A-listers for the red carpet full time, with a client roster including Dakota Johnson, Michelle Williams, Margot Robbie, Rachel Weisz, and Selena Gomez. On Instagram, she likes to post detail shots of their looks, putting the craftsmanship front and center: the crystals streaming down a showstopping and very heavy Gucci dress that Johnson wore at the Venice Film Festival this year, or a crushed flower on the waist of Robbie’s lilac Giambattista Valli gown at the L.A. premiere of Bombshell. This is Young’s way of showing her followers why she loves a particular garment—of helping them, she says, “see it the way I see it.”
This spring, Young decided to give viewers a more direct look into her mind, in the form of a YouTube series called “Hello Fashion.” Young was working from home, styling clients for Zoom appearances while supervising her sons’ remote schoolwork, and found that she really missed talking about clothes with colleagues. “I was trying to figure out a way to call in a bunch of dresses and chat about them, frankly,” she says.
Young started watching YouTube for an hour every day to figure out what she liked (cooking videos), and about a month later, she paired up with the filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman, a friend and a member of her quarantine pod, to start filming in her empty New York studio. In March, Young started releasing an inaugural batch of 10 episodes, dropping a fresh video every week; encouraged by the results, she shot a second bundle, which has been airing since late September.
While “Hello Fashion” has its Hollywood sparkle—several of her clients appear via FaceTime—its content is satisfyingly nuts-and-bolts. In the first season, which largely focuses on red-carpet styling, Young explains how she makes mood boards with her clients to zero in on their look and unpacks her styling kit to discuss the advantages of a particular shapewear brand or static spray. She turns dresses inside out to show how their architecture makes them appear light and airy, and she highlights details of their construction that you’d never notice in photos, like the raw, delicately frayed edges of Williams’s yellow 2006 Oscars dress by Vera Wang. (“When I pulled it out, I was like, Oh, this is so of its time!” Young tells Williams over FaceTime, and, earlier in the episode, cites Alber Elbaz’s deconstructed fashion at Lanvin during that era.)
In this way, Young hopes to give people an opportunity to take a closer look at the fashion flying past them on social media. “Our culture has gotten so image-literate. Because of Instagram, we’re all really smart at looking at pictures, but we also forget them. Things become super one-dimensional,” she says. “What I wanted to do is make [fashion] three-dimensional, make it tactile, explain the reasoning, show the process.”
By far, the most-viewed video from the first season is a deep dive into the work of Elsa Peretti, which Young spontaneously decided to film after the jewelry designer’s death in March. Taking note of viewers’ interest, she shifted direction when she returned to filming. This time around, each episode centers on an iconic product from an influential fashion house: Cartier’s Tank watch, Louis Vuitton’s logo trunks, Prada’s nylon, and Burberry’s trench, which will be featured in an upcoming video.
In effect, the series is a bite-size survey course in fashion history, one that may help you understand why people fuss so much over specific designs. “If you take something like the Cartier Tank, what that brand has become really comes down to one idea from one actual human. How that expanded into this instantly recognizable symbol and what that symbol means is super interesting to me,” Young says. She’s aware that she’s making a show about luxury goods, which nobody really needs, but she still wants to talk about what these items represent to us—what about ourselves we’re hoping to express when we buy the same watch as Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali, for instance. “That’s my whole job, trying to make people’s internal perception of themselves, their internal stories about themselves, apparent to everybody else,” she says.
Young grew up in a family of professors, and in her videos she comes off like the teacher who everyone likes. She speaks in a way that’s precise and measured, but with warmth and humor. (You will learn, for instance, that she finds armpits desperately unappealing and tries to hide them with sleeves or ruffles whenever possible.) Young has no plans to pursue a version of vlogger-dom that’s more unfiltered or personal than this—her “real personality,” she says, is a bit snarky and not terribly polished—though she likes interacting with viewers. “It’s genuinely nice talking to people outside of fashion, like kids who are trying to get into it,” Young says. “I like explaining it to people.”
That Young would be dropping styling wisdom on YouTube at all is a dramatic change from how she interacted with the public at the start of her career, which is to say very little. When she first branched into celebrity styling, it wasn’t a well-regarded choice for someone in fashion. (“My celebrity thing was a dirty little secret,” she told Business of Fashion in 2017.) She credits Rachel Zoe, whose namesake reality show ran from 2008 to 2013, with helping everyday people understand what celebrity stylists do. Instagram, meanwhile, brought individual stylists out of the shadows. Previously, few people knew when Young had dressed a celebrity for an event, but Instagram made that information public knowledge. It changed the dynamic between her and her clients too. She used to be hired directly by publicists, with the client remaining largely in the dark about her past work. Today, clients come in knowing exactly who Young is and what she does.
Every actor and singer has their own aesthetic, but Young’s red-carpet work tends to lean toward a kind of bold simplicity. “Kate is so, so, so smart. You can feel that intelligence in how she dresses people,” actor Michelle Williams told me over email, noting Young’s deep fashion knowledge and keen eye for what suits women, physically and psychologically. Rachel Weisz said that Young brings a mix of edge, glamour, and romance to red-carpet styling, a sensibility apparent in two of the actor’s favorite looks: the bright pink Oscar de la Renta dress she wore to the 2010 Met gala (“very, very joyful”) and the dramatically ruffled black-and-white Celine number she wore to the 2019 Golden Globes (“like a punky swan”). When I asked Weisz what she’s learned from working with Young, she wrote back: “Don’t overthink things. Don’t try too hard.”
Young plans to keep making videos as long as it’s fun, but as the world reopens and her workload ramps back up, she’s not sure how regularly she’ll drop new episodes. When it came time to shoot the second batch, she started using Zuckerman’s studio, because her own had filled up with its usual glamorous clutter: a clothing rack for every project, hundreds of shoes, packaging detritus. (Styling, Young says, is “an incredibly messy proposition.”) From August to September, she and her clients ran through a gauntlet of events including the Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Met Gala, and New York Film Festival, plus assorted premieres and late-night appearances.
In a sense, Young doesn’t need to make another episode ever again, though it would be a bummer if she didn’t. Her foray onto YouTube has already served its purpose, which was to find joy and community through fashion during a very grim time. And for those who watched in real time, tuning in every week for a new episode, that’s what it might always feel like: For 12 minutes on a Monday afternoon in lockdown, permission to think about nothing but the raw edges of a yellow silk dress.
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