Stylist Karla Welch’s red-carpet secrets
Karla Welch is the woman redefining glamour on the red carpet and shaping the looks of some of Hollywood’s most influential taste-makers in the process…
a quick test to reveal how well your fashion antennae are working. Do you look at Justin Bieber in his baggy, haute-lazy, post-skate ‘scumbro’ threads and see someone who is the definition of IDGAF cool? Or an entitled Gen Z-er who simply can’t be bothered? Do you see Sarah Paulson in vinyl red Calvin Klein and feel compelled to lavish Instagram with fire emojis or wonder what sex club she’s off to? Do you look at Tracee Ellis Ross in her explosive, own-the-room, hot pink Valentino couture and think “major” or wonder what’s wrong with a nice black dress? (Fashion people, by the way, very much ‘stan’ all of the above.)
Stylist Karla Welch, the architect behind these outfits and the most exciting looks on the red carpet at the moment, doesn’t mind what you think, so long as you think something. ‘I don’t care if you love it or if you hate it. I like the extremes, I want you to have a reaction to it,’ she tells me on the phone from LA, adding, ‘I mean, I really don’t send a look out if I don’t love it. Like, it kills me! Even though I’m very serious about so many other things, I am also really serious about my work, as surface as it is.’ And she is serious about glamour, albeit a plucky, unpredictable version of it. In Karla’s world, women don’t just enter a room – they own it.
Karla is a woman who occupies a unique position in Hollywood, both in and out of the spotlight. At the top of the super-stylist league (she is an annual fixture on The Hollywood Reporter’s 25 Most Powerful Stylists in Hollywood list), she works with a suitably glittering roster of leading ladies and rising stars, including Tracee Ellis Ross (‘always incredibly confident in what she wears’), Elisabeth Moss and Kaitlyn Dever, and is no stranger to seeing the creations she puts them in dominate column inches and attract industry adoration. And, yet, being behind the scenes is exactly how she likes it. ‘It is always my goal that it doesn’t look like I was here,’ she says. ‘I don’t want anybody to be like, “Oh, that’s a real Karla Welch look.” I want it to be Sarah Paulson’s look. My job is to give my client ownership of their dominion of what they wear.’
Despite her protestations that there’s not a ‘Karla Welch look’, there is a Karla Welch signature, defined by a fearless, to-hell-withit spirit. ‘I never want to wear a boring dress! I just can’t do it. Life’s too short,’ she says. ‘It’s fun to take risks.’ For Karla’s clients, those risks are worth taking. Just look at Elisabeth Moss unleashing her sass in a plunging Dundas gown, or Amber Valletta in Big-bird-goes-to-a-rave neon green Saint Laurent feathers and little else at the Met Ball. It’s under Karla’s eye that actor Ruth Negga became a bona fide fashion darling and US women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe cultivated a kick-ass reputation off the pitch in a succession of champion suiting. In 2014, Karla smashed up the rules of apologetic maternity dressing by persuading a pregnant Olivia Wilde into body-con Gucci sequins. Whoever she’s working with, the goal is to ‘make it look as easy as possible’.
Of course, what appears easy takes planning and precision – right down to
‘what earring I want in what earring hole’. When we speak, she’s about to start working with Kristen Wiig. ‘I don’t want to copy stuff or say, “We’re going to do Audrey Hepburn.” I think more, “OK, what is this person? What’s the vibe? What’s the project?” Then I add just a little bit of that and off we go,’ Karla explains. Then there’s call-ins, editing and fittings, so she can see what’s working and what’s not. ‘It’s trying stuff and then seeing where you can push a bit. It’s not infallible,’ she says. ‘But it’s pretty, pretty close.’
When Karla sees a look she wants, she’s tenacious. Take the fringed neon Prada she dressed Sarah Paulson in (right) for the Ocean’s 8 world premiere in 2018 (‘she loves fashion and I love dressing her’). As soon as she saw it on the catwalk she emailed the brand directly. ‘I worked so hard to get that damn dress. I was like, “I need it, I need it, I need it. Give me the fucking dress!”’ She laughs. A few days later a custom gown version showed up. ‘I died,’ she says. ‘It was such a moment.’
Moments are Karla’s speciality. ‘She has the Midas touch,’ says The Vampire’s Wife’s Susie Cave. The key to securing a ‘wow’? ‘That the dress doesn’t wear the woman,’ Karla says. ‘That’s the magic.’ Ensuring her clients feel comfortable is non-negotiable. ‘In a way, we’re psychologists and counsellors – we see our clients in a very vulnerable place a lot of the time,’ she says. ‘If you’ve ever been on a red carpet, it’s insane. People are screaming at them, there’s a lot of judgement and pressure in that moment. But what I love about the women I work with is we find a way to make it fun. And my job is to make sure that they feel amazing.’
Karla, 44, has always been serious about style. Growing up in Canada, she was ‘fully obsessed’ with Fashion File, the TV show presented by journalist Tim Blanks. Her father owned a clothing store and she would flex those fledgling styling muscles by nicking her brother’s 501s and his black motorcycle jacket – ‘which looks exactly like all the Celine men’s bomber jackets right now’. It’s not all that different to her low-key ’60s Jean Seberg-via-’90s Winona Ryder 2020 look, ‘a little tomboy, a little classic, a little French’. The family wasn’t wealthy, so the teenage Karla had to be creative. She thrifted a lot, and knew she had to make the pieces she did buy count.
Armed with innate good taste and a grafter’s work ethic, Karla started her career managing a restaurant, then became a sommelier in her early twenties. The photographer Matthew Welch came into the restaurant one day in 2001; within a year they were married and she had moved to LA. Helping on Matthew’s shoots, she became acquainted with the world of styling. Her first clients were musicians and she styled all the early ipod campaigns. Her big break, however, came in 2006, when Brooke Wall, founder of top talent agency The Wall Group, spotted Karla as she was picking out clothes for a client in Barneys in LA, signing her on the spot.
Today, despite having her run of haute couture collections and being on first-name terms with the world’s most influential designers, including Marc Jacobs, Nicolas Ghesquière and Pierpaolo Piccioli (‘Pinch me! They’re my rock stars’), the thrifty spirit of Karla’s youth continues to cast its spell. ‘There’s no reality in just wearing designer clothes,’ she says. ‘The elite world doesn’t really appeal to me at all.’ A lot of the brands she dressed Lorde in for her Melodrama tour she discovered on Instagram.
It was her desire for fashion to be more inclusive that led Karla to found her personal styling app, Wishi, last year. A side effect of her vocation is that she receives texts from people asking her what they should wear to an event, or whether or not they should buy something. Alas, we don’t all have Karla’s number or the budget to call on her services, but she decided to bring her expertise to us all. ‘I wanted to take how I work with my clients – how I look at their body type, what they like and don’t like – and really bring that to a digital space’. It resonates – Wishi has been downloaded more than 200,000 times since it launched in October.
Then there’s her clothing line of wardrobe basics, X Karla – the perfect tee, slouchy sweaters, the jeans that fit just so. She was inspired to start it after Justin Bieber started asking for extra-long T-shirts. As there was nothing like that available, Karla made her own. ‘I hate buying $100 shirts and I wanted a really specific fit,’ she says, adding that the line will be completely sustainable by the end of the year. ‘I wanted to expand beyond just styling and I think we’ve entered this space where limits are being taken off,’ she says. ‘Why would
I want to just put myself in one box?’
Certainly, she refuses to be boxed away like a pretty pair of shoes, speaking fashion and nothing else. Profits from the X Karla Levi’s collaboration were donated to gun reform charity Everytown and, in Karla’s Instagram bio, before you get to the word ‘stylist’ it simply says ‘The Resistance’ with a peace sign emoji.
With over 255,000 Instagram followers, Karla is adamant she’ll use her platform as a tool to talk about the causes she cares about. So there, among the pictures of couture gowns and premieres, are posts urging followers to call their senators or to keep abortion safe, legal and funded. ‘Sure, I work in fashion, but my heart is in activism,’ she says. ‘What I can do is use my voice to amplify the people who are doing that hard work. For me, it’s all about getting the message out, because I think we’re in very dark times and that’s more important than the dress. I love showing the dress, too, but you’re going to get the politics and the causes that matter to me on my Instagram. I’d rather not have a client than not do what’s right.’ Unsurprisingly, her hopes for this year aren’t about dressing a Best Actress winner or securing a mega-bucks campaign, but for a new President.
Given the tumult the world’s in right now – something Karla is acutely tuned into – one might wonder what the point is in caring about clothes at all. But there’s a power to be found in glamour. ‘I’m giving my clients their armour to go face the world and it can be joyful armour. It should make you happy,’ she says. ‘I understand wanting to be in sweatpants a lot of the time, but sometimes we can’t. Even though there’s so much horribleness in the world and stuff that’s way more important than this, it’s still important to do. Because we need escapism and we need to dream. We can’t just go grey, you know ?’