EMILIE KAREH
A good stylist is a human lens through which a photographer, designer or fashion house can view its subject in a fresh and very particular manner. Here we speak to the stylists who have shaped this issue of L’Uomo in order to understand their history, their outlook, and their sense of the stories they are sharing.
“Fashion is a mirror of society, showing the political and cultural climate of the moment. Clothing is the main way for people to express their identity, and while the industry might be changing, fashion and styling will always have an important role to play,” says Emilie Kareh. She first discovered the occupation of stylist after graduating from art school, when an internship at Vogue Paris led to a job assisting one of the magazine’s editors. After four years working in this role between Paris and New York, she moved to Los Angeles without a specific plan to pursue a career in fashion. But styling gradually came back into Kareh’s life when publications such as Purple and Double started commissioning her for stories. “I found that I could express myself through clothes, images and photography.” Kareh has now been working as a stylist for seven years, with clients ranging from GmbH to Emilio Pucci, and her editorial work regularly appears in magazines such as Vogue Italia and Fantastic Man.
Through studying costume design and scenography at Central Saint Mar- tins, Kareh gained the vast knowledge of fashion history and theatre design that now influences her approach to styling. “I prefer to use clothes for fashion stories as I would costume design in a play. I’m interested in the psychology behind dressing, what clothes mean to the person wearing them and the reasoning behind their choice of garments. I imagine the personalities of the characters in my fashion stories in the same way,” she says.
Born in Beirut but raised in Paris, Kareh dresses her characters in outfits that combine classical and contemporary beauty, taking ‘chic’ as her operative word. Starting from timeless garments and adding twists of individuality, she creates dramatic looks for the fashion stage. “Without the stricter dress codes of the past, both women and men are free to create their own elegance mixing eras and genres,” she says.Together with photographer Mark Kean, Kareh portrays for L’Uomo Vogue street-casted men who comfortably balance their masculine and feminine side. “This is the new elegance to me – being able to show all that is you without worrying about labels.”