WWD 2025 Style Awards Best Stylist Kate Young on Crafting Powerful Celebrity Red Carpet Fashion Moments

On Jan. 5, the biggest names in Hollywood will hit the red carpet for the 82nd annual Golden Globe Awards, kicking off another awards season with megawatt fashion front and center.

Making these moments come together takes months of preparation by the talent behind the talent — the makeup and hair artists, designers, atelier and VIP teams for fashion houses and of course, the stylists.

Over the last two decades, Kate Young, WWD’s 2025 Style Award Winner for Best Stylist, has crafted powerful looks for clients including Julianne Moore, Dakota Johnson, Scarlett Johansson and Michelle Williams, carefully balancing the needs of the spotlight while pushing fashion forward.

During an interview with WWD, Young said since starting her freelance styling career in 2010, working in Hollywood has “changed dramatically.”

“People didn’t even have a stylist. I think a lot of people bought a dress to go to the Globes, or maybe their costume designer did it,” she said.

For her first few Golden Globes, Young would coordinate to borrow dresses in New York, working with editorial PR teams and their samples, before her talent would jet off to L.A. to pick up jewelry at Neil Lane, who was one of the only jewelers in the red carpet game at the time. “It wasn’t the process that it is now, but a little more the way you would deal with somebody going to a party. They just wanted to look cool,” she said of her clients.

Now, celebrity styling has become a full-time career not only for red carpets, but press tours, personal appearances and social media postings.

“People talk about it in a way that I don’t think they did before,” Young said of the widespread interest in celebrity fashion.

Today, brands have dedicated VIP PR teams to work with stylists to create head-to-toe looks, a resource that didn’t exist during the initial years of her styling career. They work months in advance to prepare for the Golden Globes, often beginning in September and October.

“The Golden Globes are always a little bit tricky, because we’re at the end of a [fashion] season,” Young said, adding that holiday closures in Europe add to the challenge.  

“We have the couture runway shows that come before the Oscars, so you get new ideas and new dresses, and the ateliers are open,” she said. But the Golden Globes occur after a dead season for fashion, with the last runway shows having occurred four months earlier. “So many premieres and film festivals have happened. You’re tired of looking at [the fashion], so there’s always a little bit of a parade of the dresses that didn’t work in your studio, because they’re the dresses that are left and they work on someone. You start seeing new dresses as the award season gets further underway in January,” she noted.

Custom looks are also a huge focus of the awards circuit.

“Celebrities and designers form alliances in a way they didn’t used to. They might have met and become friends in the past, but now people align themselves with brands and then also become brand ambassadors or faces of campaigns,” Young said. “Now, brands are so good at identifying talent they’re interested in very early.”

Developing looks for clients who have brand contracts and relationships isn’t just about devising a beautiful image, but working with everybody involved, from the designer to the actress, to create a special moment. The second part of this equation is working with talent to cultivate these relationships through key fashion moments, on and off the red carpet. 

“I think that I’m sort of part of the marketing team,” Young quipped. “It’s wrapping them up in an identifiable, visual package.”

As lucrative fashion contracts have become more important to stars’ overall income and careers, press tours and campaigns have become key moments rivaling the power of an awards show red carpet.

“A good premiere dress gets as much play as an awards show dress,” Young said, adding that no matter the occasion, she puts emphasis on making the outfit look good in a photograph, “because reality versus a photograph are two totally different things,” she explained.

“Most of these events, the reality is for a couple hundred people max, and the photograph is for millions, so it’s more important that it photograph well than that it be beautiful,” she said of a look.

Over the last few years, the rise of “method dressing” has become popular in styling, as favored by several stars on recent press tours, including Margot Robbie for “Barbie,” Zendaya for “Dune: Part Two,” and Cynthia Erivo and Arianna Grande for “Wicked” and more.

While Young noted she’s used the technique before, she has “complicated feelings about it.”

“When you look at certain campaigns, it works visually. It encourages people to dress up to go see the movie, it gets press, it gets attention. Personally, I find it very difficult, because I don’t do costume for a reason. I’m really interested in real people and clothes. It’s the reason that I started doing this instead of editorial,” she said.

“I really like women who inspire me, and this confluence of the most important fashion on the women who are representative of our time, our culture. That confluence really does it for me. I appreciate camp and costume, but it’s not hot to me. What I think I’m good at is representing who people are or how they want to be perceived in a way that’s also relevant in the fashion world,” Young said. 

It’s this approach that defines her signature: making each woman look like the best version of herself.

Another consideration is the “political stuff,” as she called it, be it a client desiring to work with a particular brand, or wanting to convey a visual message through a new type of look in hopes of catching the eye of a television or film director to reach for a different kind of role.

“That’s the cool thing about clothes, right? We can create illusions,” she said. “I don’t think that I dress my clients alike — there’s no right signature style. There are other stylists who you can tell who they’re working with. I think that would have been smart marketing for myself, but it’s not how I’m able to think. In my mind, they all have their own personalities, and they have different bodies and are different people, so they dress differently.”

In terms of preferences, Young said she isn’t particularly girly and tends to shy away from prints, veering more toward strict and minimal silhouettes, pointing to a few Golden Globes favorites from over the years.

“Julianne Moore wore the red Bottega Veneta last year, I loved that dress. That was a good one,” she said of Moore’s striking strapless red compact wool bustier dress custom-designed by Matthieu Blazy. She also highlighted Dakota Johnson’s sparkling silver Chanel Couture dress at the 2015 Golden Globes. 

“It’s a silver Chanel Couture dress from when Karl [Lagerfeld] was still there. Dakota wore it to the Golden Globes, and it had a cardigan too, a little jacket that was so fabulous, which she wore later on. That was amazing,” Young said.

The stylist likes color and form, appreciates amazing workmanship, and carefully approaches details like ruffles. It’s about creating a visual balance between the star’s look and the step and repeat’s busy setting, as seen with Michelle Williams’ 2017 Golden Globes black and white lace dress from Louis Vuitton by Nicholas Ghesquière or Rachel Weisz’ ruffled Celine gown for the 2019 Golden Globes, she said. (Young will dress Weisz once again for the 2025 Golden Globes.)

The lead-up to an awards show red carpet requires a cool head, she said.

Young recalled a harrowing moment from 20 years ago — an instance where a Golden Globes dress was tailored “so small that it was so far from zipping up.” Thankfully the dress was voluminous enough that she could cut a wedge from inside of the skirt and sew the dress together, “and I can’t sew,” Young said. “I definitely have had things happen and every time you learn from your mistakes.”

Whether styling her celebrity clientele (her spring 2025 roster includes two big film projects for Johansson), consulting for designers, shooting editorial and brand advertising or designing collaborations (her third with jewelry designer Monica Vinader is currently in the works), Young said her approach to fashion is for it to have weight over trendiness. 

“I really care about fashion. I really care about what’s in the zeitgeist; what feels new, and what pushes buttons and makes you feel excited — makes you dream or desire,” she said.