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.
