The Secret Tricks Of A Stylist Who Dresses The A-List

Kate Young is behind Hollywood’s most famous red-carpet looks. She reveals what the rest of us can learn from them, from padding your hips to ironing.

As far as the celebrity stylist Kate Young is concerned, it is not the Devil who wears Prada, but a woman with whom “I have always really got along”. One of Young’s earliest gigs in fashion — long before she became the go-to stylist for some of Hollywood’s biggest names, from Rachel Weisz to Margot Robbie — was working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at American Vogue.

“A lot of the details in The Devil Wears Prada were exactly the same as my life,” she says, over Zoom from New York. “You know, I got there at a certain time. I got coffee. I got dry cleaning. I took the book [a cut-and-paste version of the magazine issue currently in progress] to her house. I did all that stuff. And I had never been in such close contact with that kind of clothing either. Anna wore couture and she wore Fendi furs, and there was a fax every morning on the fax machine handwritten by Karl Lagerfeld. It was thrilling.

“But I didn’t feel like… Like, when she threw her dry cleaning in a bag… She didn’t throw it. When she put her dry cleaning there, I’d be, like…” She grins broadly. “YOU KNOW? I loved every single second of it. I love her. We just had such a nice chemistry. We still really get along.”

Young, 47, the daughter of an academic, had arrived at the magazine fancying herself as the next Dorothy Parker, she says. “But when I got to Vogue I just found I wanted to be where all the dresses were. With all the rails and the shoes and all the shopping bags everywhere.”

She began doing small shoots with non-fashion subjects. “If there was a dermatologist, I styled her portrait.” Her Hollywood calling card came when she started styling up-and-coming actresses for a page called “People Are Talking About”.

Back then, celebrity styling wasn’t a thing. Some of her subjects would ask if they might borrow a dress from the shoot for a premiere they had coming up. But as stars and brands came to realise there was leverage to be had, money to be made, in what they wore, the system changed and Young was accidentally in pole position. “It wasn’t premeditated.”

September is when film festival season – and the concomitant crank-up towards next year’s awards ceremonies – begins in earnest. Young has rails and rails of eye-wateringly expensive clothes to keep on top of. There are also the make-or-break details. Such as “the armpit thing”.

The armpit thing? Young’s smile vanishes for the first time as she uses her fingers to squish the fat that presumably resides under her perfect white T-shirt (from the cult Los Angeles brand Éterne, if you are interested). “If you wear a strapless dress and you have that, it looks disgusting. All that mushy flesh getting squished together. If dresses are tight-fitted, you can get that bulge. I cover that a lot.”

You would think that Young’s roster of some of the most famous, not to mention most beautiful, women in the world would render such concerns irrelevant. Not only Weisz and Robbie, but Sienna Miller, Selena Gomez, Dakota Johnson and Michelle Williams. (Yes, Young was the one to put the then little-known actress in that yellow Vera Wang gown for the Oscars in 2006.)

I can’t believe these are women who have to concern themselves with what I learn, on subsequent googling, is called axillary fat.

Young is too canny to be drawn further on that. Earlier this year she appeared on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter’s Power Stylists issue with Gomez. You don’t become one of the most successful stylists in the business by naming names or, indeed, axillary fat, but what she will say is that no one — no one — has the so-called “perfect body”.

“All my clients are beautiful, but some are tall, some are short, some have big hips, some have no hips. The first thing is figuring out the architecture of their body and what’s going to work.”

What Young likes to do best when she takes on a new client is “a dummy fitting”.

“We try three styles of pants, three styles of jeans, three evening dresses, just to see what looks good,” she says. “Just to figure it out and take pictures and show them, like, ‘Oh, you wear cropped pants, but you should probably wear long pants because they would work better with your figure.’”

Apart from having the biggest brands in the world at her beck and call, she also has a few “weird tricks” up her sleeves. “Evening gowns are like swimsuits. You see everything. If you have a boyish figure with slim hips and not much of a waist you can look like a little tube, a sausage. So I pad out the hips slightly to give the waist shape.”

When I ask her to pick out her favourite hits, that Williams yellow number gets an immediate check. “That was an epic dress.” Then there’s Gomez’s internet-breaking red satin Dior micro frock in 2014 (“That took on a life of its own”) and Sienna Miller’s so-called kite gown by Valentino a year later. “I loved that dress. It was wild.” More recent triumphs include Rachel Weisz’s white ruffle-topped black column by Celine three years ago (“absolutely magical”) and Dakota Johnson’s “insane sparkly silver Gucci thing that was all strings and beads at the Venice Film festival last year”.

Above all, what she wants to pull off, she says, is a sense of “ease”. “An evening gown can feel like a nightgown. It can. It can feel light. It can create magic. It can make anything you are feeling insecure about disappear. And the same is true with jewellery. The kind of jewellery we’re talking about, Cartier high jewellery or Fred Leighton, it has movement and lightness. I would never put someone in something heavy.”

No prizes for guessing that Young is a jewellery geek. It was this passion that led to her collaboration with the British brand Monica Vinader on a new collection of sleek pieces that pair gold vermeil with semi-precious gemstones. The black onyx and gold bangle was, according to Vinader, “a particular technical challenge. To cut the stone in an arc without a bezel and without breakages, we had never done anything like it before.”

Young’s own wardrobe is, she insists, comparatively humdrum. “I wear a lot of navy sweaters. I love Prada and The Row.” What are her recommendations for us normals? “Less is more. Most people wear too much. There are too many things going on.” Then there is the kind of down-to-earth advice that loftier fashion types wouldn’t deign to mention.”Nobody irons any more. But if you iron it, it looks amazing. Sharp.”

To any woman who feels she has lost her way with fashion, Young’s advice is, “Do not go shopping. Go into your closet and try things on and see what still works and what needs to be altered. Maybe you need to change some hems, let something out, take something in.

“Make a list of what you need to make your own clothes work again. Do you need cropped T-shirts because all the pants now are high-waisted and you wore your T-shirts long the last time you shopped? People buy random stuff, and that doesn’t help.”

What are the most common mistakes she sees? “All that tight, nude-coloured clothing that so many women seem to be wearing. It makes them look naked. It sinks into the folds and is so unflattering.” Then there are the widespread crimes against what she calls “pant-shoe agreement”.

Which is? “You can’t wear the same pair of pants with flats that you wear with heels. If you love the pants, buy two pairs and hem them to different lengths, because if you’re wearing heels, and your pants are too short, you’re shortening your leg, you’re throwing away an opportunity to elongate that leg.”

By now I am not surprised when the straight-talking Young tells me she wasn’t disappointed when she and her record executive husband had boys, not girls. “I know lots of fashion people who are really fashiony all the time,” she says. “I really am not. I like that my kids don’t want to go shopping on the weekend. Actually, they are both starting to care a little bit more now. The 12-year-old asked if he could wear my Gucci sneakers to the first day of school.”

Her response? “No!”

What is her response to those who say that fashion is superficial? “Do you eat cake because it is good for you? No. It’s pleasure. You can survive without it, but what’s the point?”

Written by: Anna Murphy

© The Times of London