Last week, my editor, Marie Solis, passed along these photos of the actress Alia Shawkat from her press tour for the movie “The Wrong Girls.”
“I love the outfits,” Marie said.
I did, too. There was something playful and warped about Shawkat’s clothes. A denim set with cigar-brown peep-toe heels. A dress with a pattern of plate-size bull’s-eyes that looked as if they’d been cut out by preschoolers. Something as simple as a doily-esque lace blouse, worn with a black skirt.
Shawkat’s style was kooky but earthbound, miles from the scrubbed-up, plasticky look of celebrity style now. It wasn’t as untamed and aimless as the way zoomers dress in downtown New York, but it did simmer with that spirit of experimentation and looseness. She looked messy, aspirational, human.
So, I wanted to know more about the human behind these outfits, Shawkat’s stylist, Alexis Asquith. When I caught up with her, I learned she had studied psychology, and had stumbled into styling when an acquaintance asked her to help out on a shoot a few years ago. Shawkat is, at the moment, her only celebrity client.
She was unsure of where her next job would come from, worried about money and wondering why I was speaking to her at all. But I knew I had glimpsed that elusive thing we’re always trying to sniff out in fashion: something different.
“I have a really hard time making people look fancy; it’s not my strong suit,” Asquith said, calling from her family’s home in Buffalo, where she grew up. “When someone wants to look real, that’s more interesting.”
When most people hear “celebrity stylist” they think of someone like Law Roach, who dresses Zendaya and Anya Taylor-Joy, and boasts over two million Instagram followers. Industry insiders might cite Danielle Goldberg, who has burnished the image of rising stars like Ayo Edebiri and Greta Lee.
Stylists with long lists of famous clients often work symbiotically with luxury labels. The labels provide exclusive access to runway clothes, which stylists get their clients to wear on red carpets. Sometimes those relationships can turn into brand ambassadorships or ad campaigns.
Asquith, who now lives in Los Angeles, operates quite differently. She puts clients in vintage clothes right out of her closet, and spends her own money to buy whatever else she needs.
She works with small labels like Emily Dawn Long and Giovanna Flores because that’s what she’s into. It’s also what she can afford.
“My finances are in bad shape,” Asquith said. “I want to do the best job possible, so if I need to spend X amount of dollars to do it, I’m just like, let’s do it,” she said, adding an expletive.
She said her sensibility stemmed from her years as a dancer. She’d walk into rehearsal in one outfit, and then, as she warmed up, shed layers, reconfiguring a sweater around her waist, tugging down her socks.
Her styling today retains that picking-it-apart feel. “It’s all a bit undone,” she said.
In this time of algorithmic perfection, that undone-ness is refreshing. It comes through best on Asquith’s own Instagram account (which has fewer than 7,000 followers as I write this).
Once a month, Asquith goes into her friend Joey Grana’s store, Scout LA, and takes photos of herself in clothes off the racks. The outfits are inventive but easy to copy. They’re worth a study, celebrity or no.
The Power Polka Dots of Yayoi Kusama
The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who died this month, was — among so many other things — among the artists who had their work printed on the most designer goods.
Her primary-colored polka dots caught the eye, in 2012, of Marc Jacobs, then the artistic director of Louis Vuitton, who speckled trunks and handbags with her signature print. That became the start of an enduring fashion marriage between Kusama and the brand.
When the French house reissued the designs in 2023, the collaboration was a blockbuster. By that point Kusama, who broke out in the 1960s as the rare woman in New York’s testosterone-dense art scene, had long since returned to her native Japan, where she lived in a mental hospital. Kusama was not without controversy: In 2017, a Vice Magazine article resurfaced racist comments she had made, for which Kusama later apologized. But in the gap between her Vuitton collaborations, Kusama had stumbled into Instagram fame with her selfie-friendly “Infinity Room” installations.
Vuitton, cannily, capitalized on her heightened name recognition with an even larger collection: Sneakers, purses, dresses, leather jackets and wallets were again plastered with her polka dots. Kusama, with her trademark bob and sets of dotted dresses, was elevated into a sort of luxury mascot by Vuitton. A gargantuan Kusama, as big as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon, peeked out from the roofline of the label’s shop on the Champs-Élysées. A robotic Kusama did some pantomime painting in the window of its Fifth Avenue flagship. Kusama, not the LV mark, was the draw.
Other things worth knowing about:
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A bag for fall that resembles a pumpkin, and a sneaker that looks like a vampiric armadillo.
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The frenzied energy around this year’s U.S. Open (have you heard, it’s hard to get tickets?) has lifted the market on vintage tennis gear. Everyone wants something that says, “I’ve been a fan since a grounds pass cost $30.” A new online shop called Graphite is doing it best. The 1993 Open hat is sadly gone, but you can still get a press pin from the ’83 Open for $45.
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A Sandy Liang/Cou Cou Intimates collab? Like putting a bow on a bow.
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The artist Geoff McFetridge’s new pop-up store, Acid Snow, which he bills as “a project to be outdoors … better,” is open today and through the weekend in Atwater Village in Los Angeles. It’s all a bit mysterious, but a pair of sun-bleached Vans he posted on his Instagram story looked tasty.
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In other L.A. news, the Kansas City, Mo., boutique Mergers, known for its breezy mélange of crochet totes and everyday button-ups, is opening a second shop in Echo Park. The Eastside Rag had the scoop.
What we’re reading:
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Kanan, Wolf, Bare, Dragan, Albie, Rad, Lilou, Paxton — these are just some of the names Zoe Latta says she encountered on the first day of kindergarten at Malibu Elementary. (In addition to being half of the design duo Eckhaus Latta, Zoe writes an excellent slice-of-life/shopping Substack.)
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This long tale on the investment wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner captures how knotty (you could even say incestuous) the A.I. industry really is.
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Naomi Fry’s review of a 2000s-era documentary about the Hamptons that makes the wealthy enclave look “almost quaint.
Goodbye, Dolly
“She challenged stereotypes of all kinds about women, appearance and substance with a wink, a healthy dose of self-aware irony and a refusal to apologize for what she wanted.”— Vanessa Friedman, in her appraisal of Dolly Parton’s bedazzled, bewigged and bodacious style.
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