Before she was styling celebrities like Selena Gomez, Michelle Williams, Sophie Turner, Dakota Johnson, Nina Dobrev and countless others for red carpets, award shows, fashion campaigns, magazine covers, movie premieres, press tours and just about every fabulous thing in between, Kate Young once spent her summers going to dances at the Palmer Pool on Monday nights and catching movies at the Starlite Drive-In with friends. She was obsessed with fashion magazines, but also really enjoyed studying ancient Greek and Roman history.“I wanted to be a classicist,” says Young. “I don't think it crossed my mind that fashion was an actual career.”
Young recalls rainy-day trips as a little one to the Allentown Art Museum with mom, Barbara, who was the tennis and volleyball coach turned assistant athletic director at Lafayette College. “She knew that I liked fashion,” says Young. “She would take me shopping, she would take me to New York, she would take me to the library because I wanted to read all of the magazines.” And Young says her mom would always let her pick out her own clothes, even when other moms thought it was crazy. “She was very encouraging of all of that.
Dad Jim was an assistant professor of kinesiology at Penn State Lehigh Valley and had a passion for cycling—Young recalls so many memories with her family at the Velodrome (now Valley Preferred Cycling Center). Jim was founder of the Penn State cycling team, director of the Future Champions Cycling Club and one of the founders of the National Collegiate Cycling Association; he has been described as an inspiration to an entire generation of collegiate cyclists. In August 2021, he passed away after a hard-fought battle with Parkinson's disease, but his legacy lives on. Young's brother Matt was a champion cyclist, and locals can enjoy the Jim Young Super Tuesdays track cycling series in his honor at the beloved T-Town.
Reflecting on her teen years in the Lehigh Valley, Young says she began taking night classes and summer courses at Lafayette College when she was around 14 or 15 years old. “I hated high school,” she says. “I wanted to get out and get on with life.” When Young learned that she could apply for early admission before her senior year, she ditched Easton Area High School to study English on College Hill. But perhaps it wasn't quite the launching pad that Young was searching for. She started giving college tours to prospective freshman during her own freshman year. “I knew it inside and out. I knew everyone and every building,” she says. She took a massive leap across the pond and went on to finish her education at the University of Oxford.
After college, Young began working in fashion PR in London, but she knew she wanted to be on the editorial side of the industry. It was a fortuitous trip back home to Easton for Christmas that would ultimately catapult her career. Hoping for some advice, Young went to lunch with her mom and a woman named Kati Korpijaakko, who was the mother of two of Young's high school friends and also the art director for Glamour magazine. Korpijaakko introduced Young to the director of human resources at publishing powerhouse Condé Nast. From there, Young was brought to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's office. Wintour's titles now include Global Chief Content Officer and artistic director of Condé Nast along with Global Editorial Director of Vogue; she is considered by many to be the most important figure in fashion. “By the time I got home to Easton, I had a job offer on my answering machine,” says Young, and she had two weeks to get her affairs in London in order.
Young started at Vogue in 1997. The first few months on the job entailed many bus commutes back and forth from Easton and staying withfriends in the city until she settled into a place of her own. She'd spend 11 months as Wintour's second assistant. “I learned how New York fashion people work. In French, they call them the good addresses," she says. “Being Anna's assistant is really useful at Vogue because you know everybody and you know what they do. It was pre-social media so they weren't all famous. I didn't come in knowing who Grace Coddington was.”
When she moved on to the fashion market department as the European market assistant, Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada (and fellow Lehigh Valley native), would fill Young's role as Wintour's assistant.
Meanwhile, Young continued to move up the ranks at Vogue. Her big break was a photo shoot with Debra Messing that was scheduled to take place over a holiday weekend. When no fashion editors were available to style Messing, Young was nominated and flew to Los Angeles. She went on to become a sittings associate at Vogue, and in 2003, Young styled the first-ever cover of Teen Vogue, starring Gwen Stefani.
She began splitting her time freelancing between Vogue and Teen Vogue, and her career as a celebrity stylist started to take off. As Young got to know the publicists and the celebrities on set, they began asking her about borrowing clothes. Her time in Vogue's fashion market department meant that she had the connections to make it happen for them.
In 2010, Young decided to take celebrity styling full time. “For me, it was the thing I enjoyed most,” she says. “It just felt more fun. It felt more buzzy.” While magazine budgets were getting cut, celebrity PRs were starting to emerge, and it was clear that celebrity was the future.
It was also at that time that she gave birth to her second son, Leif, who is now 13. Young's older son, Stellan, 15, accompanied her on a recent trip to Paris Fashion Week, but she says he's much more interested in history, English and music. It's possible he takes after dad, Keith Abrahamsson, who is the founder and director of A&R at Mexican Summer Records. The pair met in 2003 in New York, where they were hanging out in the same crowd. Back then, Young says he had a gig as a DJ that she would go to all the time. Now, the family of four—plus their cat, Nagini—splits their time between the city and their home upstate. “It's very outdoorsy our life up here,” says Young, sharing that they are always hiking, love to ski in the winter and enjoy road trips and traveling in the summer. “I do pottery when I'm up here.”
On trips back to the Lehigh Valley, Young spends time with her mom walking the local trails, exploring Barton's Auction in Nazareth and grabbing lunch at Daddy's Place in Easton. They also enjoy cooking and eating things from her mom's garden.
Young's success in celebrity styling has prompted The Hollywood Reporter to name her the most powerful stylist of the year three different times. The Business of Fashion says Young's “knack for turning Hollywood ‘It-girls' into sartorial stars has made her one of the most powerful figures in the dance between the film and fashion industries.” So, what's her magic? Young thinks her editorial background had a heavy hand in influencing her taste. “I tend to think about things a little bit differently than people who have just come up in celebrity styling. I'm not often trying to do something that's just really Instagram friendly but I'm thinking about the people that I admire in fashion and asking, would they really like this?”
Young's signature might be dressing clients like themselves in a comfortable and effortless way, but she also thinks it's important to elevate and make a look more interesting. “There's this funny line,” she says. “If I have the possibility to get the absolute best stuff, which is being made all over the world by the best fashion designers, it makes a lot more sense to me to push the envelope a little bit and not be serving the people at home what they already know they like.”
Social media has played a big role in how others perceive her business. Young says that when she started putting her clients' red carpet looks on Instagram, there was a stretch of time when she would go to fashion shows and people would congratulate her on her recent success. “I'd be like, what do you mean? I'm doing the same thing, I don't have any new clients, nothing's changed, but they were seeing my work for the first time and associating it with me.” Social media has also opened up fashion to the general public. “I'm a little jealous of kids now who can see everything. I had to wait for six months when the magazines came out to see what was shown in Paris,” she laughs. “And I certainly couldn't buy anything at the Palmer Park Mall that looked like what they were showing. Now kids can do that on the internet.”
So, what's Young's advice for that kid in Easton following along with fashion shows, shopping online to recreate looks and dreaming of a career in couture? Develop your eye and figure out what you like. “So much of what I did as an assistant was keep a notebook and write down everything all of the editors and photographers said that I didn't know,” she shares. “I didn't know the movie references. I didn't know the art references. You have to research it and figure out what you like. Read articles with people you admire, and when they say a name you don't know, go down that hole and figure it out.”
Young says she remembers figuring it out when she was first coming up and knows it can be difficult. She reflects on how differently she once dressed, opting for only the cool designers paired with what everybody else at Vogue liked. Now, her go-to look is a navy sweater or sweatshirt with a pair of jeans. She's also got a serious thing for '90s vintage.
But vintage or not, Young rarely finds herself looking back. She's described herself as overly optimistic, very goal-oriented and obsessed with the future. Currently, she's looking forward to another collaboration with women's jewelry designer Monica Vinader this fall. She also teases a capsule wardrobe she's created with a brand at affordable prices: “I'm really excited because it's sort of everything I want to wear.”
Young's time at Vogue (and an impressive stint at Interview magazine) paired with her extraordinary accolades and years of styling celebrity clients might have onlookers assuming otherwise, but she's the first one to not take any of it too seriously. “It's just clothes. I'm not saving any lives,” she says. “This is just fantasy.”
Published as "Kate Young: From Lehigh Valley to Legendary" in the August 2023 edition of Lehigh Valley Style magazine.
