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IMAGE CONSCIENCE
Stylists decide what you wear, how you wear it and where you buy it. Meet the most important people in fashion. Maybe the world.

Text: CLARA YOUNG

1 | 2 | OCT 03

There’s a music video on TV. The band is standing in a black snowbank, playing their instruments with gas masks on. They’re buried in crocheted hats and layers and layers of woolly Icelandic stuff that’s vaguely Balenciaga-inspired.

What makes this video so hip and arresting is not just the song, "Vaka," or the band, Sigur Rós, or the director, Floria Sigismondi. It’s also the stylist who created the band’s look: L.A.-based Canadian Carol Beadle. Beadle got her start with Marilyn Manson in 1994 and went on to style David Bowie, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Auf der Maur and many other musicians for video. She and compatriot Todd Lynn (who has styled clients like Bono for U2’s Elevation Tour) are part of the reason why rock stars in torn T-shirts and leather pants are a thing of the past.

"There’s a difference between creating an outfit and just dressing somebody," says Beadle. "There are people who create a story and take it to an artistic level. They’re mixing it up, throwing in new designers, a vintage piece, something they’ve designed themselves." In other words, after decades of paying homage to designers and supermodels and photographers, we are finally in the era of the superstylists, fashion’s new power players.

The stylist’s work is difficult to explain because it is so many things: A stylist is a storyteller, a marketer, a muse, a shopper and an agent. She’s a costume designer when she needs something she can’t find. She’s a wardrobe watchdog for celebs. She’s a scout, sniffing out new talent and ideas. "Ask the parents of any stylist and I guarantee you they won’t be able to tell you what their son or daughter does for a living," laughs *Surface magazine stylist Karina Jeffries.

Unless you’re an obsessive celebrity-watcher or American Vogue reader, you are probably only starting to hear about stylists. But these arbiters of high style drive the look of runway shows, magazine articles, ad campaigns and individual stars. Sex and the City’s stylist, Patricia Field, is practically a household name with her own line of clothing, House of Field. The editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris is former stylist Carine Roitfeld, who concocted Gucci’s blockbuster look in the early days of designer Tom Ford. Brit stylist Katie Grand, who masterminded the image make-over of Italian luxury leather brand Bottega Veneta, is editor of the fashion magazine POP and the creative director of the seminal London magazine The Face.

Wait a minute. Since when did these behind-the-scenesters, who used to just shop, pick off lint and tape up hems up during photo shoots, get so mighty? "Ten years ago, the stylist was merely a lapdog for the photographer," says Roitfeld. "We didn’t even know stylists’ names. Now there are stylists who are stars like photographers – there are about 10 in the world everyone wants."

Those 10, and the legion of stylists who have not quite achieved star status, are the shadow figures who can make or break a fledgling designer. They can ramp up a designer’s sales just by putting his or her clothes on a celebrity or in a magazine, a movie or a music video. (For instance, when Madonna’s stylist, Arianne Phillips, selected a black goth dress for the star to wear to the VH1 awards in 1998, its young Belgian designer, Olivier Theyskens, leapfrogged to stardom.) They can style ad campaigns that create an instant, unforgettable image for a brand.

Stylists talk about "telling a story" with clothes. Think, for example, of the big-hair, Valley of the Dolls-inspired advertising campaign Versace unleashed a few years ago. The look that spawned a thousand gold diggers came from Lori Goldstein, former stylist for the trend-setting Italian Vogue. "I read Valley of the Dolls when I was 11," recalls Goldstein. "It was perfect for Versace!"

1 | 2 | OCT 03