Stars like Ayo Edebiri, Greta Lee and Olivia Rodrigo trust stylist Danielle Goldberg when they need to look their best.
Danielle Goldberg was sitting at a table with her eyes glued to a laptop screen. On it was actress Greta Lee, who was trying on a satin gown the
“This dress cannot puddle,” Goldberg, 40, said, squinting her eyes as she focused on a slight break at the bottom of the custom Loewe piece. (Lee is an ambassador for the brand.) It was just past 9 on a Saturday evening in January, the night before the Golden Globe Awards, and Goldberg, a stylist, was conducting a video fitting from her studio in New York with Lee, who was beaming in from her home in Los Angeles.
“What it’s doing right now,” Goldberg said of the dress on-screen, “it can’t do that. It has to be perfect.” Nanaz Hatami, a tailor Goldberg has worked with for five years, who was with Lee, sprang into action.
Video fittings have been a solution for the stylist as she has juggled the demands of her job, which lately has included dressing Lee along with actress Ayo Edebiri and singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo for awards season appearances.
Goldberg, who lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband, Michael Goldberg, a creative director, and their young son, doesn’t like to spend too much time away from home if she can help it. Especially now that she is pregnant with her second child.
Halfway through the fitting with Lee, flashes of red began appearing at the bottom corner of Danielle Goldberg’s laptop. They were photos from the stylist’s assistant in Los Angeles showing Edebiri in her own custom dress, made of scarlet satin by Prada. The following night, millions of viewers watched as Edebiri clutched the gown’s train while accepting the Golden Globe for best actress in a TV musical or comedy.
The next Sunday, Goldberg was contemplating another outfit with Edebiri, this time in person at a Los Angeles hotel where the two were meeting before the Critics Choice Awards. In a video call from the hotel room, Goldberg explained that the actress’s look — a roomy white suit by the Row and wire-rimmed Oliver Peoples sunglasses — was inspired by outfits worn by Whoopi Goldberg in the ‘90s.
Danielle Goldberg has been working with Edebiri for just a few months: The actress’s team approached the stylist after noticing her work with Lee and Kaia Gerber, a model and an actress. (Goldberg’s celebrity styling fees are typically paid by studios and brands working with her clients.) Edebiri, 28, said Goldberg had played a crucial role as her profile rose after she received a spate of accolades for her work in The Bear.
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Advertise with NZME.She choked back tears as she described how Goldberg’s approach to styling had made her feel comfortable and, in turn, confident. “We have these conversations,” Edebiri said. “Sometimes it will be, like, an ode to Whoopi. Then I can have that in my mind when I’m out there taking pictures, which is fun. It’s like an actor telling a story.”
“I get to be myself,” she said, “but also have this armour of the clothes.”
Chioma Nnadi, the head of editorial content at British Vogue, said Edebiri had made “strong fashion choices” that still reflected her “sense of humour and youthful energy” — a balance, Nnadi added, that can be hard to strike. Goldberg’s ability to shape a rising star’s look, she said, “is so powerful.”
Recent looks Goldberg has styled — including a feathered-and-opera-gloved ensemble by Bottega Veneta that Edebiri wore to the British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, and Rodrigo’s vintage white Versace gown at the Grammys — reflect her aim to have “this moment that feels like a quiet statement,” as she put it.
Zanna Roberts Rassi, a fashion correspondent for E! Live from the Red Carpet, described Goldberg’s aesthetic as an antidote to the flamboyant attire that has lately been embraced as formal wear. “You know when you are in a meeting and there is a person who speaks quietly and you really listen to them?” Rassi said. “She is the equivalent of that.”
Lee, 40, compared her relationship with Goldberg to “the dreamiest collaboration” between an actor and a director. The Past Lives actress said the outfits they have chosen — like a meme-inspiring, blood-orange Bottega Veneta dress she wore to the Governors Awards last month in Los Angeles — are not for attention, but “for no one other than us.”
They met in 2013 when Goldberg had a gig in the wardrobe department of a TV show on which Lee was a guest star. Later that decade, Lee approached Goldberg about dressing her while preparing to promote another show.
The stylist put the actress, who was pregnant at the time, in an archival floral-print dress from a Balenciaga collection by Nicolas Ghesquière. “I knew that I wanted to do something mini, even though she was pregnant,” Goldberg said. “Greta can carry fashion that isn’t easy and make it look effortless.”
Lee said their red-carpet moments could not have been achieved without the stylist’s exhaustive researching of references and encyclopedic memory of runway shows. Goldberg started learning about the industry sooner than others: Her father, Oded Nachmani, founded a contemporary sportswear line called Coolwear not long after she was born. (Her mother, Carrie Nachmani, came up with the name for the brand, now defunct.)
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She was raised in Old Westbury, New York, and has two younger sisters, Michaela Podolsky and Arielle Charnas, both of whom are influencers. Charnas may be better known to some as Something Navy, the name she used to develop an audience online and then later to start a clothing brand of her own, which has drawn criticism for the quality of its products and has reportedly accrued millions in debt.
“To see her build her own business and see it fail publicly,” Goldberg said, before collecting herself. “My sister has incredibly thick skin,” she said of Charnas. “She needs to figure out what her next step is, and she is. The noise doesn’t help.”
Goldberg said she is far less comfortable with sharing her personal life on social media than her sisters are. Lee said: “In her dreams she would be invisible.”
While studying at Syracuse University, Goldberg had internships at Vogue and with stylist Andrea Lieberman. Her first job out of college was a front-desk position at Pier 59 Studios in Manhattan. It afforded her face time with editors and stylists she aspired to work with. “That was my savviest moment to date,” she said.
She was later hired as a fashion assistant at T: The New York Times Style Magazine but was fired after six months because jewellery was misplaced. “It was a crucial lesson,” she said.
Two other magazine jobs followed before Goldberg started working as an assistant to Annabel Tollman, a celebrity and editorial stylist. While she was working for Tollman, who died in 2013, her boss started styling Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen for a tour promoting their 2008 book, Influence. Goldberg got to know the sisters and, in 2009, she was approached about dressing them for the Met Gala.
“I was in a Patagonia store when I got the call,” she said. “My head nearly exploded.” She dressed Mary-Kate in vintage Christian Lacroix. Ashley wore a white gown by the Row.
She continued to dress the Olsens for events and appearances in the months that followed before moving on to jobs styling runway shows for New York designers like Timo Weiland and Tanya Taylor. She styled Ethan Hawke for a period after meeting the actor at a photo shoot.
In 2017, she dressed Kendall Jenner for a Pepsi commercial that the brand quickly pulled after criticism that it trivialised Black Lives Matter protests. “It was insane to me how it all turned out,” Goldberg said, adding that she had no knowledge of what the final ad would be.
That same year Laura Harrier hired Goldberg while that actress was promoting the film Spider-Man: Homecoming. “Laura hiring me changed everything,” Goldberg said, because she was hungry for clients who “really loved fashion.”
On a Wednesday in late January, Goldberg was at her studio organising both Rodrigo’s wardrobe for the Grammys and Edebiri’s for a Saturday Night Live hosting gig (a Thom Browne corset and pants). “If I wasn’t this pregnant, I would be getting on the first flight to L.A. after SNL for the Grammys,” she said.
Her second child, a girl, is due in May — the same week as the Met Gala. Maternity leave doesn’t exist in her chosen profession, Goldberg joked.
But time off, according to Lee, is not something the stylist often seeks out. “Danielle is so satiated by the work,” she said. “She is relentless.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Christopher Barnard
Photographs by: Isabelle Zhao, Sinna Nasseri, Getty Images and AP
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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