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.
Walsh also 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.
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 Sports and Fashion Feel More Connected Than Ever
Because these elite athletes are in such a spotlight, it becomes something that brands and partners go after them for — to represent them as ambassadors. Also, when you’re that visible and 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 already looking up to you. 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.
Trends vs. 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. The idea of a trend being the only piece of information you use when you get dressed 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, going 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 right now?” The world is also quite complex right now. So to use fashion as a means to embody the version of the person that you want to be — that’s a much more substantial, worthwhile use of it.
Why Consumers Are Craving Fashion Experiences
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 have them really feel like they’re being brought into the world. When you invite people to interact in a more experiential way, it becomes something you actually try on for size, and it’s immersive. When done well, you leave an immersive experience transformed and changed. As opposed to just being sent an item from a designer or being invited to shop, when you’re being educated, inspired, and immersed in something in a sensorial way, it’s just so much more fun.
Advice for Aspiring Stylists
It was around COVID that it became very apparent — our industry shut down as celebrity stylists. It really gave you time to think about how you can use your talent and your abilities to keep creating, both professionally and in terms of generating income, but also: I believe we’re all here to serve the world in some real way.
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 a powerful storytelling medium. Start figuring out what you want to say to the world and why.
The way I did it: I genuinely want to shift the way women view their possibility and their potential. That’s been an underlying thread across my celebrity styling and everything I’m working on, from the book to all the extensions coming, including an app. But don’t limit yourself and your possibility. Keep finding out what makes you tick, what makes you connect with people, what your message is, and what story you want to tell. The opportunities will come when you’re brave enough to put that out there — and don’t worry about the money to start, because if you begin telling that story to the world, the opportunities will follow.
