For a long time, when I thought of the pop star Justin Bieber, if I thought of him at all, the person who came to mind was a teen-age boy, with side-swept bangs and oxford shirts and hoodies, seemingly incubated in a middle-class suburban mall. But as Bieber matured, and as his music developed from crooning ballads to experiments with E.D.M. and hip-hop, his behavior became more volatile, and his cherubic looks changed, too. Last spring, studying images of Bieber on the Daily Mail’s Web site, I realized that he was no longer a boy but a man, and perhaps even a very attractive one—a strange and slightly disturbing thought. But Bieber wasn’t just handsome; he looked interesting. One photograph, taken shortly after his arrival at the Coachella festival, contemporary music’s annual bacchanal, showed him dancing among the throng, his dirty-blond hair bunched under a rolled-up bandanna. He wore a baby-blue short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts, with Louis Vuitton slides and grubby-looking socks. In the following months, he was photographed at the Beverly Hills Hotel wearing baggy sweatpants with a drawstring that extended almost to his ankles, and on his way to dinner at Mastro’s Steakhouse wearing Dickies work pants, partly unzipped. The looks combined seventies post-hippie burnout with nineties Orange County skater. They were idiosyncratic enough to appear not at all calculated. Critics referred to Bieber’s new style as “dirtbag,” “dirtcore,” “sleazecore,” and “scumbro.”
Karla Welch, who has been Bieber’s stylist since 2011, was behind his latest incarnation, which she describes as “full Hunter S. Thompson.” “I always say that Justin was the best teacher I had,” Welch told me one afternoon at her studio, a high-ceilinged, pine-beamed space, situated on a leafy Hollywood side street. Over the years, Bieber has asked Welch to find leopard-print sweats, to fashion pants from “fabrics that didn’t exist,” and to alter his Adidas sneakers so that they were more to his liking. When he asked for extra-long T-shirts, she had to have them made. Some people mocked the long tees and his comically proportioned drop-crotch pants, but, Welch said, “six months later, that’s what flooded the men’s market.”
Welch, who was named the most powerful stylist by the Hollywood Reporter in 2017, is forty-four. She has a short, Jean Seberg hairdo and elfin features, but her manner is serious and no-nonsense, occasionally brusque. The actress Judy Greer, who has been Welch’s client for a decade, told me, “She’s the most self-confident woman I’ve ever met.” The afternoon I visited, Welch was wearing shiny black plastic pants, a white fisherman’s sweater, and Timberland boots, and looked like a character from an S. E. Hinton novel who’d made stops in Harlem and rural Maine. The ensemble radiated a mysterious assuredness. She had recently outfitted several clients for the Golden Globes award ceremony and styled Bieber for the cover of Vogue, and was dressing Tracee Ellis Ross for the televised announcement of the Oscar nominations. She had also just styled two Super Bowl ads, one starring Amy Poehler and the other featuring Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, of “Broad City.” “People always ask me, ‘Are you in your busy season right now?’ And I’m, like, what does that even mean?” she said.
Grace Wrightsell, one of Welch’s three full-time assistants, a serene twenty-nine-year-old with silver-dyed hair pulled back in a ponytail, nodded in agreement. “It’s also because now there’s events for Amazon, Netflix, Hulu,” she said. “People have their faces pumped out there all the time.”
Welch often complains about the Internet’s visual glut, but she is adept at creating moments of social-media excitement that transcend it. In 2014, when the actress Olivia Wilde was expecting her first child, Welch styled her for the Golden Globes. Rather than have her wear a conventional soft-edged Empire-waist dress, Welch selected a skintight sequinned Gucci gown that made pregnancy suddenly seem like a power move. For the Emmys last year, Welch dressed Ross in a hot-pink Valentino couture dress, whose exaggerated volume seemed to suggest that Ross was enjoying a private joke at the expense of the party she was attending.
These days, celebrities must appear as fully formed personalities, and the traditional division between onscreen and off has been rendered obsolete. This is true even for politicians. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently live-streamed herself making instant mac and cheese in a hot pot while discussing the virtues of socialism, she successfully presented herself as a woman of the people. Welch’s clients—who include Amy Poehler, Ruth Negga, Sarah Paulson, Elisabeth Moss, and Busy Philipps—are actresses and entertainers whose public images likewise depend on projecting a relatable kind of authenticity. Ross told me, “You can often tell with stylists—‘Oh, that’s a So-and-So client.’ But, with Karla, her clients just look like themselves.”
The role of the celebrity stylist is relatively new. Decades ago, actresses attending film premières and award ceremonies were outfitted by movie-studio costume designers. After the collapse of the studio system, in the late sixties, they often dressed themselves. Some of the most memorable red-carpet looks occurred in the nineties. As the media historian Moya Luckett explained to me, many celebrities’ outfits from that time were “disastrous”—the white satin, one-sleeved dress that Kim Basinger designed herself for the 1990 Oscars, for instance—but the best ones seemed to be a result of celebrities’ natural style, “like Sharon Stone in the Gap turtleneck.” (Stone wore the top with an Armani velvet coat to the 1996 ceremony.)
By the two-thousands, designers were competing to dress the most famous celebrities, as a form of free advertising. Stylists brokered deals between celebrities and designers, and the red carpet became a runway. There was a clear sense of the Hollywood hierarchy. One stylist told me, “If you’re A-list, [fashion] houses will often just throw things at you. But, if you’re C- or D-list, no one will loan out to you, and you’ll have to buy or rent a gown.” Welch said, “If a client is only at a certain level and she’s, like, ‘I want to wear Givenchy couture,’ then that’s not going to work out.” Today, Luckett said, what appears to be “rampant individuality” is usually much more considered. Bieber has had endorsement deals with Adidas and Calvin Klein. Negga is a “Louis Vuitton ambassador.”
Until recently, stylists worked behind the scenes. Few people would recall that Andrea Lieberman, who started the fashion line A.L.C., was the stylist who, for the 2000 Grammys, put Jennifer Lopez in a plunging chiffon Versace gown, even though the public frenzy that the dress prompted was a determining factor in Google’s push to create its Image Search. The first stylist to become a celebrity herself was Rachel Zoe. She starred in her own reality show, “The Rachel Zoe Project,” on Bravo, and created her clients—Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie among them—in her own image: bone thin, boho chic, with chunky jewelry, chiffon layers, and enormous sunglasses. The Times referred to them as “Zoebots.”
“None of us would be here if it weren’t for Rachel Zoe,” Welch told me. “That woman worked. She had to change Lindsay Lohan three times a day!” (When I asked Zoe how styling had changed, she wrote, in an e-mail, “Changed would be an understatement! When I started, stylists were a secret. It was an undercover job, and not front and center like it is today.”) Like Zoe, Welch has her own clothing line, xkarla, which she founded with her husband, Matthew, in 2017. This summer, Welch will launch an app, which, for a fee, will allow users to solicit wardrobe and shopping advice from stylists chosen by her, and which she hopes will become “kind of an indispensable need for retailers.”
Welch’s name has also become synonymous with woke chic. Last year, for the Golden Globes, she dressed eight of her female clients in black dresses, in support of Time’s Up, a coalition for victims of workplace sexual harassment that was formed in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein exposés. Some questioned how much change women could effect while wearing stilettos and jewels. But Welch believes that clothes can be “armor.” As a “card-carrying member of the resistance,” she often presents her work as a political crusade, albeit a very Hollywood one. On her Instagram feed, red-carpet shots of her clients are scattered among statements supporting causes such as Black Lives Matter—glamour and gravitas reinforcing each other in a very contemporary kind of synergy. “In the last five years, I’ve helped shift the perception of women who are my age, and women who are not sample size,” she said. “I’ve upped the visibility of women who weren’t necessarily fashion’s first choices.”
Recently, she styled Anita Hill (in a black velvet gown from the Vampire’s Wife) for an Oscars party, and Oprah for InStyle—an experience that she compared to seeing Pope John Paul II when she was eleven. “She projected something so spiritual,” Welch told me, of Winfrey. “I was, like, Oh, my God, lead a cult. Lead something.” For a moment, Welch seemed about to cry. “She is on a pedestal that she fucking owns. I guess it’s self-realization.”
Welch has a knack for remembering every outfit she has ever worn. She grew up Karla Culos, the youngest of four children in a close-knit Italian Catholic family in Powell River, British Columbia, two ferry rides from Vancouver. Her mother was a nurse, and her father owned a menswear store. She helped at the store, worked a paper route, and had a job at a gas station. “We’re a family of workers,” she told me. She experimented with fashion early on, bleaching Calvin Klein jeans in her parents’ basement. In Vancouver, she dropped out of college, travelled for three years, and then moved back to the city to study food-and-beverage management. Meanwhile, she started waiting tables at the well-known Indian restaurant Vij’s; within a year, she was the manager. She said that the role taught her to be unapologetic about separating professional duties from personal relationships. “You can’t lead if you run with the pack,” she said.
In 2001, Matthew Welch, a photographer, was in Vancouver for a job, and came into the restaurant. Karla was wearing a tweed A-line dress with a shawl collar, and boots—“very Miu Miu-esque,” she said. A year later, they were married and Karla had moved to L.A., where she helped on Matthew’s shoots. But she was unhappy. “Part of the problem was that I wasn’t the boss,” she said. “I wasn’t making my own decisions.” At the time, Matthew was shooting mostly musicians for magazines such as Ray Gun, GQ, and Rolling Stone. Karla noticed that the stylist he usually worked with often ran late and seemed unimaginative, and asked if she could do the job instead. Matthew balked at hiring his wife, so Karla called a record company that he was working with and persuaded someone there to let her style an upcoming tour shoot with the rock band Lifehouse. In one image from the shoot, the three members of the band pose on the flatbed of an old truck; in a ratty vintage T-shirt, jeans, and Converse sneakers, the lead singer looks not unlike a scumbro.
In 2003, Matthew, who had moved into advertising, was hired to shoot the early advertisements for the iPod. The ads featured models dancing, shown in silhouette against colorful backgrounds, the white cords of their headphones connecting to the devices in their hands. Welch, who dressed the models, focussed on details—“the hoodie, the popped collar, the fringe”—in order to conjure a distinct character for each figure. There was a modern disco queen, her thin wrist laden with bangles; a floppy-haired indie rocker; a baggy-pantsed raver. Together, they appeared to be members of some well-designed, multicultural tech utopia. It became one of the most memorable ad campaigns of the past two decades, and MTV credited it with launching the iPod “out of the geek quadrant and into the mainstream.”
Welch’s transition to celebrity styling came in 2006, at Barneys in Los Angeles, where she was selecting clothes for the singer Feist. Brooke Wall, the founder of the Wall Group, which was established in 2000 to represent stylists and makeup and hair artists, also happened to be at the store, and began watching Welch, who was dressed in Levi’s and a striped shirt and wearing red lipstick. Wall recalled, “I thought, I want to talk to this interesting woman.” Welch has been represented by the Wall Group ever since, and has gradually amassed a cadre of actress clients, whom she calls her “girls.” They usually pay her per event or per look rather than keeping her on a retainer. “I’m already at your beck and call,” Welch said. “I don’t want to be owned.”
Her clients talk about her as they would a guru. Olivia Wilde said, “She’ll be, like, ‘Are you looking for a change in your career? I think I can help guide that.’ ” Wilde told me that last year, when she was in the process of directing her first feature, “Karla was, like, ‘Let’s start putting you in a strong shoulder, or a tux.’ She got that I didn’t want to be an ingénue anymore.” Welch is confident in the contributions she has made to her clients’ successes. When she started working with Ruth Negga, in 2016, she said, “nobody knew who Ruth was, and all of a sudden she’s in a custom Marc Jacobs look. It set a trajectory for her presence, right up to her getting an Oscar nomination and going to the Oscars.”
Two years ago, Welch realized that she didn’t want to “just pick out dresses.” “I want to direct,” she said. “I want to do an ad campaign. I want to direct a commercial, maybe a film one day. I want to make things that I love. I want to make clothes.” She added, “I don’t want to make a ton of clothes.” For her brand, xkarla, she created a line of extra-long T-shirts, in collaboration with Hanes, inspired by the ones Bieber wore on his Believe Tour, and a nine-piece “capsule collection” for Levi’s, the proceeds of which went to the gun-control organization Everytown. Matthew photographed the advertisements for the collection, in which women including Paulson, Ross, Philipps, and Hailey Baldwin—now Bieber’s wife—each wear different Levi’s separates.
Karla and Matthew live in Laurel Canyon with their thirteen-year-old child. In January, the couple visited Levi’s Eureka Innovation Lab, which occupies a two-story loft in San Francisco, to meet with the Levi’s design team, who had hired them to make another capsule collection. Matthew, tall and bearded, wearing the coastal hipster-dad uniform of black jeans and a plaid button-down shirt, hung back behind Karla, who was wearing a plaid Max Mara coat with a wool fringe, black jeans, and gold-and-black Chanel booties, and looked like a glamorous street urchin.
To design her clothes, Welch, who has no formal fashion training, mostly makes tweaks to existing items. She had brought to the meeting at Levi’s a number of vintage pieces that she was planning to use as inspirations: a short, tight, brown-and-cream zippered sweater in a Cowichan knit traditional to British Columbia; a plaid workman’s coat; a caramel-colored corduroy club jacket; and the pair of Capital E Levi’s jeans, slightly flared and ripped at the knees—a rare vintage style—that she had been wearing when Wall discovered her at Barneys. She picked up the jeans, and murmurs of “Capital E!” were heard around the room.
Jonathan Cheung, the senior vice-president of design for Levi’s, a soft-spoken, slightly nervous-seeming British man in a broken-in Levi’s jacket and immaculate white sneakers, explained that he wanted the collection to speak to Welch’s teen years. “Narrative first, product second, I always say,” he said, encouraging Welch to talk about her youth. “It’s kind of like Method acting, to get you into feeling it.”
“I want everything to be Sherpa and denim and corduroy and a little bit of plaid,” Welch said. “It’s about nostalgia. Like, even though I hated wearing that sweater because it was so itchy”—she picked up the Cowichan knit—“I loved wearing it at the same time.” She considers Denise Huxtable, Lisa Bonet’s character on “The Cosby Show,” whose neo-hippie clothes were often chosen by Bonet herself, a formative influence. “And I was obsessed with Princess Diana,” she said. “And the Sloane Rangers in England”—the upper-class West London tribe known for wearing riding pants and Hermès silk scarves. As a teen-ager, Welch watched a lot of “Fashion File,” the Canadian TV show hosted by Tim Blanks. “It’s my education,” she said. “I’m self-taught.”
She started riffing, her voice taking on a rhythmic quality: “It’s really the woods. It’s muddy—it’s, like, everything should be worn with a gum boot.” A moment later, recalling the stoner boys she hung out with in high school, she threw out more phrases. “I think it’s always what I want to wear myself,” she said. “Future vintage. It’s the thing. Tomboyish. The modern pioneer woman?” Cheung nodded and took notes.
One afternoon, as Welch drove her all-electric, zero-emission BMW i3 through L.A. traffic, she told me about Angela Manuel Davis, a former champion sprinter who now teaches at a SoulCycle in West Hollywood, and whose classes are attended by Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Lana del Rey, among other celebrities. The Los Angeles teachers’ strike was under way and, as we drove past a knot of protesters standing outside Fairfax High School in the light rain, Welch honked her horn enthusiastically.
Davis is known for her preacher-like exhortations (“Ride away from anything that’s not serving you anymore!”) and is, Welch told me, “hyperspiritual.” Welch began taking the classes five years ago, and said that, at the beginning, “I was the quiet person at the very very back, and then I just kind of worked my way to the front row.” She went on, “I can really pinpoint that her messaging and her teachings have made me as successful as I am. It’s about not being afraid to be successful. Like, why be fine if we can be great at something? And it’s just this incredible idea that, like, ego is not a bad thing.” She paused. “I guess it’s close to therapy or like going to church.”
Many of Welch’s clients talk about her in similar terms. Busy Philipps described “borderline traumatic experiences” she had had with earlier stylists, “where I wouldn’t fit the dresses and I felt this heavy disappointment in my body from them”; Welch, by contrast, understood her immediately. In a recent photo on Welch’s Instagram feed, Welch tends to Elisabeth Moss’s shoes while buried under the skirt of the actress’s Monique Lhuillier ball gown; both women saucily give the camera the finger. The critic Rhonda Garelick compared the relationship between celebrity and stylist to “a magical friendship, which is almost like a romance or having a magical twin.” Of course, the friendship is also transactional, boosting each party’s “personal brand.” Garelick told me, “The star gets to be the stylist’s signature creation, and the stylist gets the reflected celebrity.” When I asked Garelick what she thought of Welch’s female clients, she called them “idiosyncratic and quirky.” She went on, “I can’t lie. I would love a personal stylist.”
Around six o’clock on the morning after the meeting with Levi’s, Welch received a text from a representative for the supermodel Karlie Kloss, who has eight million Instagram followers. Welch tries to answer every call and message from her clients, no matter how early or late. “They think I’m there just for them,” she said. “That’s the goal.” Kloss was asking for some outfits for a trip to Paris the next day. “It’s not just enough now to be dressed for the shows,” Welch said, rifling through a clothing rack in her studio. “If you’re going to dinner, or just walking down the street, you’re going to get photographed.” She and Kristen Kiehm, an assistant, arranged outfit after outfit on the floor, as Welch tried to crack the code of each ensemble. A button-down shirt would look good under a vintage Ralph Lauren jacket, but the oyster-colored satin one was too shiny; would a matte cotton one, in traditional white, be a better choice?
As Kloss’s wardrobe was being packed up, Welch’s phone rang. It was Sarah Paulson, calling on FaceTime from New York, seeking last-minute direction before the New York première of “Glass,” the M. Night Shyamalan superhero thriller, in which she stars. A few days earlier, there had been a “dressing emergency” after Melissa McCarthy appeared, in an online video, wearing the dress that Paulson had planned to wear for the première. (The dress, intensely ruffled and in dusty rose, was by Marc Jacobs, and, McCarthy said in the video, had shoulder pads “like chicken cutlets.”) Welch had set about acquiring another gown, which she recalled seeing on the runway. It was designed by Raf Simons for Calvin Klein and was made of crinkly, shiny red plastic, with large puffy sleeves and a ruched front—a mix of “Little House on the Prairie” and Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee.” Paulson had been hesitant. “That dress is a lot,” Welch told me.
On the phone, Welch, who had been speaking in a businesslike patter all morning, sounded cajoling, almost motherly. “I love the red pumps and I like those with the sheer on them as well,” she said.
“What would your first choice be?” Paulson asked.
“Can we go wide on that white pump that I quite like?” Welch said.
She asked to see how Paulson’s earrings looked with the rest of the outfit, tapping her fingers on the desk as she waited. When Paulson held them up to her ears, Welch gasped and said, “I love those!”
“So are you good with everything?” Paulson asked, sounding calmer.
“Yep, I’m cool,” Welch said, before signing off. “That’s why I love Sarah so much,” she said, turning to me. “She always wants to make sure I’m completely satisfied with the look.” ♦
