Kelsey Stiegman
Kelsey Stiegman covers fashion for Marie Claire as a contributing fashion writer, combining witty celebrity style commentary with highly shoppable trend and buying guides. Her work sits at the intersection of red carpet analysis, “It girl” seasonal fashion, and e-commerce-driven curation, with a particular emphasis on shoes, bags, and statement accessories. Alongside this, she writes service pieces on styling specific items - such as how to wear thong sandals into fall - for other outlets, extending her focus from celebrity imagery into practical wardrobe strategy.
Celebrity Style and Red Carpet Coverage
Stiegman’s most distinctive thread is her close reading of celebrity outfits, treating each look as a story about persona, status, and trend direction. At Marie Claire, she regularly dissects the style choices of stars like Zoë Kravitz, Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and the Jenner sisters, translating individual outfits into clear fashion takeaways.
Recent coverage of the MTV VMAs shows her approach in detail: she tracks the comeback of over-the-knee boots on the red carpet and frames it as part of a broader “Pop Diva fall” mood, tying silhouettes and materials to a specific seasonal aesthetic.
In a companion piece on VMAs looks, she focuses on bras replacing traditional gowns, using humor and sharp visual description to explain how this shift redefines eveningwear for performers. She applies the same lens to single-celebrity stories, such as Kacey Musgraves honoring Dolly Parton in a rhinestone cowgirl-coded dress or Beyoncé revisiting a prior “rich mom” outfit on her 43rd birthday, using references and micro-details to show how each look builds on an existing style narrative.
Across these pieces, her tone is conversational but exacting, emphasizing fabric, fit, and proportion while making clear what each ensemble signals about current celebrity fashion codes.
It Girl Shopping and Affordable Luxury
Stiegman also leans heavily into shopping content, where she turns trend observation into specific product recommendations that mirror the wardrobes of “It girls” and style influencers.
Her fall fashion guides typically center on curated lists - such as 19 fall items It girls are buying before they sell out or definitive It girl-approved fall shoes - linking each item to a recognizable aesthetic and explaining what role it plays in a seasonal wardrobe. These stories foreground e-commerce, but her selections are framed through narrative themes like “rich-looking” accessories and cool-girl essentials, rather than generic product roundups.
In a piece on affordable fall 2026 bags, for instance, she focuses on designs that look luxurious while staying under a set price point, balancing cost-consciousness with trend relevance. Other buying guides tap into specific retail ecosystems - such as Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale, Aritzia’s fall drop, or shopping lists anchored by brands like Cos, Reformation, and J.Crew - showing readers exactly where to find the pieces that match emerging street and celebrity trends.
Her language in these guides underscores scarcity and timeliness, regularly highlighting items that are poised to sell out and positioning her lists as early access to emerging “It girl” staples.
Seasonal Trends and Street Style
Beyond individual products, Stiegman maps how trends evolve across seasons, focusing on the practical shifts that define everyday dressing.
Her fall coverage includes essays on building outfits around specific categories - boots, sweaters, bags - and on assembling full autumn wardrobes from a finite set of pieces, effectively acting as a roadmap for polished cold-weather dressing. In “I Can't Wait for Fall 'Fit Checks - 18 Pieces I'm Mentally Building Outfits Around,” she structures the story as her own autumn shopping list, walking through how each garment or accessory slots into a range of looks.
She extends this approach to summer and transitional dressing, as in her Nordstrom Anniversary Sale guide that revives a “bored” summer wardrobe through a tight edit of 19 pieces.
Her runway and street-style reporting adds another layer: coverage of Copenhagen Fashion Week spotlights a shift from plain white tanks to romantic lace blouses, using attendee outfits to flag a directional top trend for the coming season. Across these stories, she moves easily between high-level trend language and specific styling advice, explaining how to translate runway or influencer cues into grounded outfits that work across different phases of the year.
Career Background and Freelance Work
Stiegman brings a long editorial background to her current role at Marie Claire.
Before joining the masthead, she served as Senior Fashion Editor at Bustle, overseeing the site’s fashion coverage and shaping its approach to trends and shopping content. Prior to Bustle, she spent six years at Seventeen, building expertise in youth-focused fashion and pop culture-driven style storytelling. Now working as a freelance fashion editor and writer, she specializes in e-commerce and fashion news, with Marie Claire as a core outlet for her celebrity style commentary and trend analysis.
In addition to Marie Claire, she contributes fashion pieces to publications such as InStyle and Cosmopolitan, extending her voice across multiple lifestyle and entertainment platforms. Her external work - including pieces on styling thong sandals into fall at Glamour - mirrors the themes of her Marie Claire coverage, blending product-driven advice with a strong point of view on how people actually wear clothes.
4 more fashion journalists.
Aaron Royce
Aaron Royce turns runway moments and celebrity event dressing into clear, wearable stories that show readers how trends move from the red carpet to real life. He is a fashion news writer at The Zoe Report, where he covers fashion, trends, celebrity style, and related news across the site. He also works in a fashion news editing role at The Daily Front Row, extending his reporting into the industry’s front row and party circuit. As a contributing and freelance journalist, he writes for fashion and lifestyle magazines including People, InStyle, Marie Claire, and other outlets, with a focus on shopping, beauty, and culture. His reporting centers on fashion’s visual language, celebrity influence, and shoppable outcomes across fashion, beauty, fragrance, jewelry, skincare, menswear, wellness, accessories, shoes, pop culture, and celebrity news.
Abigail Connolly
Abigail Connolly stands out for covering celebrity culture and fashion as a visual story about outfits, images, and online reaction. She writes for Yahoo and SheFinds, where she covers celebrity news, fashion, and related lifestyle topics. Her beat focuses on stars, royals, and political figures, with stories on red carpet looks, runway trends, state-visit wardrobes, and social media posts that shape public image. She has written about Oprah Winfrey’s all-white Cannes look, Paris Fashion Week fur, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Dior dress, Melania Trump’s style, and royal figures such as Queen Camilla and Prince William. Her reporting is short, tightly focused, and descriptive, using fan comments, captions, and sourced claims to show how a single look or post drives conversation online.
Aemilia Madden
Aemilia Madden writes about how people actually live in their clothes, blending disciplined wardrobe editing with specific shopping recommendations and a clear point of view on taste and restraint. A fashion and lifestyle journalist, former senior fashion writer at Vogue, and now a freelance writer, editor, and consultant, she focuses on service-driven fashion and lifestyle stories grounded in personal testing, long-term wear, and real scenarios. Her work connects shopping lists, trend coverage, and essays into a focus on more intentional choices about what to buy and how to wear it. She reports through first-person experiments, practical shopping guides, sale roundups, and trend explainers, and her portfolio spans Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, T Magazine, The Cut, The Wall Street Journal, and her newsletter Taeste Bud, where she extends her interest in archival references, obsessions, and inside-the-closet cleanses.
Air Mail
Batsheva Hay writes fashion and culture pieces for Air Mail with the sensibility of a working designer rather than a conventional style reporter. She is the founder of the cult label Batsheva, known for prairie dresses and vintage-inflected, modest silhouettes that rethink traditions of feminine dress. At Air Mail she sits inside style and lifestyle coverage, writing about fashion and shopping from the point of view of someone who designs the kinds of clothes she describes. Her background as a former lawyer shapes a structured, argumentative way of taking apart dress codes and conventions. She focuses on vintage clothing, modesty, subversion, and how old styles gain new meaning. In guides such as her Upper West Side piece, she treats locations as mood boards and supporting characters, using sensory detail and lived-in references to map the cultural influences behind her clothes and the world her label inhabits.