Rather than creating the raw ingredients of fashion — the knits and shirts and suits — Collet was interested in the meals you could make out of them. Magazines, with their transportive photo shoots, captivated her. She interned at Purple magazine and worked for Masha Orlov, an influential French stylist. She inched her way up the stylist hierarchy, working on shoots for Chanel fragrances and Esprit.
The role of a stylist in a runway show, or for a campaign ad, can be a tricky one to explain. If a designer is akin to a film director, a stylist is more like an editor. A designer makes a sweater you want to buy; a good stylist composes not just an outfit, but a person you, ideally, wish to be.
Collet insists that it is not a glamorous job. It entails lugging suitcases of clothes and crawling on the floor to pin a pair of trousers on a model. As a result, she never wears anything that would be called luxury. When we spoke, she was dressed almost entirely in Uniqlo. “I just like comfort workwear, basic stuff,” she said.
In her 20s, she struggled to make rent and debated working at the Monoprix retail chain.
Eventually though, she had built up enough contacts and a respectable résumé to get steady work styling shoots for various White-Pages-thick fashion magazines that catered to the most niche and nerdy. At first she worked primarily in women’s fashion because that was where she found opportunities.
“I don’t really see the difference between men’s and women’s,” she said. “On the runway, yes, but in the world, you know, it’s the same.”
Her break came in 2018, when Auralee, having made the leap from fashion week in Tokyo to Paris, was seeking out a local stylist. A publicist passed along Collet’s name, and she took the job. She found, in the brand, a shared DNA with what she likes to work with.
