Brittany Hampton is blasting Olivia Dean as she scurries through her apartment, impeccably decorated with art deco furniture sourced from Facebook Marketplace. Monographs from esteemed Black artists cover her coffee table; hundreds of vintage Vogue magazines line the wall. Littered with luxury candles, the apartment smells as good as her.
The Filipina-American stylist has come off a jam-packed year. Last May, she was named a member of the Golden State Valkyries Collective and creative-directed the team’s inaugural fashion show, celebrating the intersection of sports and fashion. In October, she headlined a panel on sports and fashion at the espnW: Women + Sports Summit in Ojai. She has been an active part of crafting Sloane Stephens’ image ahead of her return to pro tennis. Her client Nika Mühl, a point guard for the Seattle Storm, was recently named best-dressed rookie by GQ. And Paige Bueckers, whom Hampton calls her “good luck Chuck,” was recently named WNBA Rookie of the Year.
When the pair first met, for a StockX shoot in 2022, Bueckers was a NCAA player, edgy and cool yet with little fashion knowledge, said Hampton. Two years later, Bueckers wore an internet-uproaring all-white Louis Vuitton suit to the 2024 draft. Hampton also styled Buecker’s own professional debut in 2025, when she was drafted No. 1 to the Dallas Wings.
Buecker’s transition, under Hampton’s guidance, from sneakers to designer loafers (she favors androgynous looks) mirrors the industry itself. With a $200 million battle for the next WNBA expansion teams (Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia were ultimately rewarded contracts), women’s basketball has certainly come a long way since the financial instability of the early 2000s. But no one was looking out for the young female athletes — limited from the robust contracts of their male counterparts — who lacked the funds to match their wardrobes to their playmaking.
“That was a field that I feel like no one was willing to touch,” says Hampton, who initially made the transition to dressing and designing for athletes through her work with Russell Westbrook’s brand Honor the Gift.
This penchant for mentorship has been a lifelong through line for Hampton, who herself was nurtured in fashion by her maternal grandmother — her Apo — who ran an organization called Fashion Arts & Youth Enterprise that taught young girls how to sew. Working retail as a teenager, Hampton found any excuse, and any form of transportation, to make her way down to Los Angeles — her closest geographical in to the fashion industry. On graduation day from the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in San Francisco, she and her parents drove down to Koreatown, Hampton’s first neighborhood in L.A., with a mattress strapped to the car. After two years, her hard work paid off: As a 23-year-old, Hampton was tapped to lead in-house styling internationally for Nickelodeon.
“Building out characters was the main thing that I did at Nickelodeon,” she says. “Understanding that Sam and Cat, the characters, also had to play Sam and Cat on the red carpet, and Sam and Cat in any appearance that they made.” And where Nick executives initially wanted Miranda Cosgrove et al. in runway looks, Hampton understood her audience and instead went shopping at Macy’s, Old Navy, Nautica and Nike.
For Hampton, styling young female athletes is not so different from the charge of styling young Hollywood. “We are curating the trajectory of who these women are about to become,” says Hampton, who refers to her celebrity-athlete clients as “kids” despite being only 36 herself.
But for all the encouragement she offers her “kids,” stepping into her own power, she says, has been “hard, f— hard.”
“Coming up in this industry, stylists were very behind the scenes,” she explains. “They weren’t the image curators, they weren’t [at the forefront].” That has changed in recent years, due in no small part to Law Roach, famously Zendaya’s stylist, whom Hampton assisted immediately after leaving Nickelodeon. But comfortability in the public eye is still an ongoing journey for the stylist, even as she understands the need for designers and brands to know who she is, in order to know who her clients are.
If you were to catch the stylist off-duty she would most likely be sporting athleisure. As she gets older, comfort has become key, she says. But when she puts it on — and she can put it on — she always considers her grandmother’s fashion big three: quality, color and taste.
“Things that you might think, ‘Oh I’m only gonna wear that one time’ — that’s what you grab,” she says of her “eclectic” style. “Sometimes I can be this femme fatale, sometimes I can be super sporty, sometimes I can pop up to Paige on set and be super goth and she’s like ‘What are you wearing?’ and I’m just like, ‘Oh, please.’”
Image asked Hampton to share five statement pieces that belong in every woman’s wardrobe. Here are the stylist’s starting five.
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