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The 26-year-old stylist is InStyle’s 2024 New & Next Awardee.
At this year’s “Garden of Time”-themed Met Gala, one look stood out. Amongst dozens of women wearing floral frocks was Tyla—the South African singer who has ascended to global pop stardom in the past few years—in a strapless bodycon dress covered in grains of sand as if she were a human hourglass. The world quickly learned it was the work of French designer Olivier Rousteing for Balmain, who had been experimenting with the sand-covered fabric for some time behind the scenes. However, most people didn’t know that stylist Katie Qian was the one who made the pairing happen.
“It was very serendipitous. We knew we were looking for something edgy and different that stood out from the rest of the Met Gala looks, which is so hard,” Qian recalls. When she and Tyla approved the design, they did not fully know what wearing such an avant-garde creation would entail. After the dress made its way stateside, it had to be transported inside a truck by itself and sewn onto the singer’s body to hide the zipper. As Tyla walked the red carpet, bodyguards carried her to the museum’s steps to ensure the delicate fabric didn’t rip.
Later that night, Qian got a frantic phone call from the singer: “She’s like, ‘I’m in the bathroom because I can’t sit down to have dinner,’” Qian recalls. In a virtual fairy godmother move, Qian was able to get Rousteing—who was in attendance—to cut Tyla’s dress into a mini so she could enjoy the rest of the night, documenting the live scissor-cutting process on Instagram in one of the event’s most viral moments.
It’s these types of less glamorous, logistics-cum-magic moments that have made Qian one of the most celebrated young stylists in the business. A child of the Internet era, Qian, 26, first fell in love with fashion by sharing magazine editorials on Tumblr, where she learned about the styling craft through the work of veterans like Edward Enninful and Alistair McKimm. “When I came across styling, I just felt like that sounded right,” Qian tells InStyle. “I always loved combining different looks and telling a story with outfits. That really called to me.”
Although she started her career in magazine editorials for publications like Them, Wonderland, and Paper, today, she’s best known for her work with celebrity clients—names like Tyla, Conan Gray, Tinashe, Sabrina Claudio, The Marias, and Camila Cabello. Her work spans music videos, like Sabrina Claudio’s “Warm December” and Tyla and Travis Scotts’s “Water Remix,” and on-stage costumes for Conan Gray and Camila Cabello.
To call her styling work innovative is an understatement: Qian continuously pushes boundaries, helping her clients build new worlds and stories through their wardrobes with an unabashedly maximalist, glamorous, and bold approach.
Cabello’s latest musical era, marked by the release of her 2024 album C,XOXO, is a prime example of how Qian’s touch can transform an artist’s sartorial identity. Once known for her vivacious, colorful style, Cabello’s darker and more vulnerable musical era required an aesthetic evolution to match. Qian looked to Cabello’s roots in Miami—a major theme throughout the album—for inspiration, choosing riskier pieces like bikini tops as eveningwear and deconstructed gowns in a moodier palette of blue, black, white, silver, and gray. “The feel of the clothing is really not polished; very youthful, a little bit messy, but feels cool and fresh,” Qian explains.
Though she’s more comfortable behind the scenes, Qian’s tour de force celebrity work has catapulted her into the spotlight. It’s not only her clients who are waiting for Qian to deliver hit after hit but millions of fans, too. “It's interesting because there's pressure being put on a creative process, which is something that usually needs breathing room and time and patience, so that's kind of like my biggest challenge at the moment,” she admits. There are other challenges: Styling isn’t all flashing lights and archival couture. It’s hundreds of emails with publicists, hours of packing and unpacking boxes, intense negotiations with brands, and an increasingly big microscope on her work of celebrity stylists. “We can make it look easy, and we turn out a product that looks effortless,” she says. “That's really amazing for us.”
InStyle chatted with Qian about her whirlwind career, styling today’s biggest stars, and what it’s really like to be a sought-after stylist before the age of 30.
How She Got Her Start:
“I grew up in San Diego. There's no fashion industry there. I remember really getting into fashion and runway shows and fashion history from Tumblr and social media. I was really determined to have a fashion-related career. In the beginning, it was like a lot of random creative shoots with friends. I would style my friends for senior portraits and stuff. Then it was a lot of test shoots. I would hire my own models from San Diego agencies and put together test shoots, and I would cold-email a bunch of different photographers to see if they wanted to create together. It kind of just felt like a passion project at the time and then grew into something bigger before I realized it.”
Her Style DNA:
“My perspective is really playful and very bold. I love playing with the balance between masculine and feminine dressing. I love playing with hard and soft. I'm kind of a maximalist as well. I really love it when different textures, colors, and patterns are mixed together but create something really harmonious and wonderful. I have a very feminine perspective in my style and I love to make women feel really sexy and powerful, but from a female gaze.”
Making the Transition to Celebrity Styling:
“That happened pretty naturally, I think. I was doing mainly editorial in the beginning, and it eventually just branched off into being editorial but with talent, like celebrity covers. That's really how I met my first celebrity clients. I would be booked on an editorial with them, and then we’d figure out that we vibe together, and then I would get hired from then on. I think I really found a great middle ground with music. I really just love working with musical artists because it can be similarly creative and has that storytelling element.”
The Best Parts of the Job:
“90 percent of the job is grit, and then the other 10 percent is the really rewarding, fulfilling part, which is having something in your head that you think is amazing and you want to bring to life and then seeing it. For musicians and actors, there’s a big image and identity factor. It's just really fun to have wardrobe be a big part of that and help them tell their story. Also, I just love being around music and pop culture in general.”
Her Biggest Challenge as a Stylist:
“As my career grows, I'm taking on more clients, and I'm working a lot more. So, I would say the biggest challenge is balancing being a creative person with having a job that has a lot of structure, and you need to give a certain output. At a certain point, there is a kind of pressure, whether it comes from me or whether it comes from outward forces to always be delivering.”
What’s Never Missing from Her Styling Kit:
“One thing I really like that's a great trick is adhesive thongs. I do a lot of naked outfits. The girls love to be sexy. So we're here to make that happen with no underwear lines.”
Her Top Celebrity Looks of All Time:
“Celebrity music videos are my favorite. I feel like the looks and music videos are super iconic and burned into my brain. Rihanna’s ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’—all of the outfits. I love Gwen Stefani’s ‘What You Waiting For,’ where she’s wearing all Dior by Galliano looks.”