Even if you don’t know Erin Walsh, you’ve seen her work. She styles the most talked-about celebrities, including Selena Gomez, Mindy Kaling, Kerry Washington and Anne Hathaway, who is currently turning heads on “The Odyssey” press tour. Walsh is now also an entrepreneur and author. Her first book, “The Art of Intentional Dressing: Your Essential Style Guide for Manifesting a Magnetic Life,” was published by HarperOne in May (and includes a foreword by Hathaway).
As if she’s not busy enough, Walsh teamed up with luxury lifestyle and concierge platform Velocity Black as an official partner to create exclusive fashion experiences for its members through curated styling sessions and fashion programming. To celebrate the World Cup, she created a shoppable capsule in partnership with Moda Operandi, inspired by how fashion shows up around the game (complete with a limited-edition collection of hand-painted Marc Jacobs World Cup Tote Bags).
Photo: Courtesy of Velocity Black
We caught up with the stylist while she was in Los Angeles for the partnership and talked all things fashion, sports and intentional dressing.
Why do you think sports and fashion feel more connected than ever?
Because these high elite athletes are in such a spotlight, it becomes this thing that brands and partners go after them to represent them as ambassadors. Also, when you’re that visible and you’re operating at such a high level, fashion can up-level how you feel. So it’s an obvious thing to harness fashion when you’re in the spotlight as an athlete. And it can be so much fun, too. People are looking up to you anyway.
Then, in the chicken and the egg of it, if you look at how a lot of high-profile athletes end up becoming the face of a brand, that’s because they were already becoming that supernova version of themselves for the public.
Photo: Getty Images
Your philosophy is all about intentional dressing. Do you think people are becoming less interested in trends and more interested in personal style?
Trends matter because they give us ways to think of what we’re not thinking of and to expand and up-level, which is always important because we’re not here to stay the same. I think the idea of a trend being the only piece of information that you use when you get dressed, that doesn’t sound interesting to me. And I don’t think that resonates with a lot of people because, ultimately, fashion is meant to make you feel like the best version of yourself.
When you ask yourself, when you go to get dressed, ‘How do I want to feel?’ — that’s something that will resonate and serve you on a much deeper plane than just, ‘Is this bag trending on Instagram or Fashionista right now?’ The world is also quite complex right now. So to use fashion as a means to embody that version of the person that you want to be, that’s a much more substantial, worthwhile use of it.
Luxury brands seem to be investing more in experiences than products alone. Why do you think consumers are craving those kinds of moments right now?
I talk a lot with brands about the new landscape of partnerships and for VICs, Very Important Customers, what is the most effective way to engage with their customers and to have them really feel like they’re being brought into the world?
I think when you invite people to interact in a more experiential way, it becomes something that you actually try on for size, and it’s immersive. When done well, you leave an immersive experience transformed and changed. So as opposed to just being sent an item from a designer or being invited to shop, when you’re being educated and inspired and immersed in something in a sensorial way, it’s just so much more fun.
Photo: Velocity Black
What advice would you give to aspiring celebrity stylists who want to build a career like yours, and eventually branch out into books, brand partnerships and entrepreneurship?
It was around COVID that it became very apparent, because our industry shut down as celebrity stylists. It really gave you time to think about: How can I use my talent and my abilities to keep creating and, both from a professional point of view [and] creating income for my family, but also: I believe we’re all here to serve the world in some real way. So, how do we keep doing that?
I think the celebrity styling business is a service business. Your worth can be determined by whether somebody else is working. So, in terms of creating a business outside of that, social media is such a great means to do so. It’s such a great storytelling medium. Start figuring out what you want to say to the world and why.
The way that I did it… I genuinely want to shift the way women view their possibility and their potential. And that’s been an underlying thread, incidentally, with both my celebrity styling and all the things that I’m working on, from the book to all the extensions of that that are coming, including an app that I’m working on.
But don’t limit yourself and your possibility. Keep finding out what makes you tick, what makes you connect with people, what’s your message, what story do you want to tell? Then the opportunities around that will come when you start being brave enough to put that out there. And don’t worry about the money of it to start because if you start telling that story to the world, the opportunities will follow.
