Kristen Nichols
Kristen Nichols connects luxury fashion, runway intelligence, and editor-led shopping into highly specific stories about the items and trends that define how style leaders dress now. As associate director of special projects at Who What Wear, she oversees luxury and runway coverage along with wedding features, shaping the masthead’s view of designer fashion, status accessories, and future-facing trends. Her work focuses on the luxury market, runway reporting, shoppable edits, and interviews with industry figures, supported by experience across fashion, editorial, and publishing.
It Items That Define Contemporary Style
Nichols’s recent coverage is dominated by the idea of the “It” item, tracking the bags, shoes, colors, and silhouettes that signal insider status in any given season.
She profiles specific pieces like designer tote bags that have reached “It” status, the Row’s Cecily bag as a defining accessory of summer 2026, and the bag predicted to sit in every fashion insider’s closet for fall. Headlines such as “Royal Purple Is the It-Girl Color of 2026” and “7 Fall 2026 It-Girl Outfits That Are Already Huge” show how she ties individual colors and outfits to broader shifts in taste among early adopters. She drills into accessories with stories on the specific earrings cool dressers are wearing in Paris and New York, loafers every It girl owns from New York to Paris, and the jewelry trends that editors back as front-runners for the year.
Even when she writes about clothing, the focus remains on highly targeted pieces - taffeta pants, satin bags, jeweled sandals, personality dresses, or a single “tasteful staple” every confident dresser will own - framing them as status markers rather than generic basics. Her angle is consistently about identifying the precise items that confer fashion credibility and making those pieces legible and shoppable.
Trend Reports That Map the Luxury Fashion Landscape
Alongside micro-level It items, Nichols produces broad runway and trend reports that map out the season’s luxury fashion landscape. She authors deep dives such as “10 Trends Set to Define Spring 2026 Fashion” and “10 Trends Set to Define Fall 2026 Fashion,” translating runway collections into clear themes for readers.
Pieces like “The Return of Romance: How Soft Fashion Is Set to Define 2026” and “Pretty, Soft, and Romantic: The One Trend Every It Girl Is Suddenly Wearing” track shifts toward softer, more romantic aesthetics and explain how they will show up in real wardrobes. Her work often connects fabrics and silhouettes - opulent brocade, pencil skirts, alpine-inspired jackets, leggings styled in tasteful ways - to larger movements in luxury and status dressing.
The 2025 Luxury Report, which breaks down the brands, items, and trends defining designer fashion, underlines her role in synthesising information across labels and seasons into a coherent view of where the high end of the market is heading. These reports position Nichols as a translator between runway shows and everyday styling, with an emphasis on clarity and actionable direction.
Editor Shopping Lists and Monthly Fashion Finds
Nichols frequently writes in a shopping-led format that foregrounds her own and her colleagues’ selections, giving her coverage a strong editorial curation component. She produces monthly roundups such as “Who What Wear Editors Told Me Their 21 Best Fashion Finds This Month,” “26 Best Fashion Finds This Month,” and “38 Best Fashion Finds This Month,” each framed around specific buys editors stand behind.
Her “I Did a Nordstrom Deep Dive” and “I Just Did a Zara Deep Dive” stories show a methodical approach to retailer assortments, where she surfaces tightly edited lists of pieces she recommends and often explains how to style them. Nichols also writes personal shopping lists - highly curated seasonal carts for spring, summer, and fall, as well as an extensive 2026 shopping list - that present her taste as a guide to investment dressing. Large-scale projects like “The Who What Wear 100: Every Spring 2024 Item You Should Be Considering” demonstrate her capacity to build comprehensive edits that cover entire seasons while still highlighting hero items and categories.
Across these formats, she balances aspirational luxury with practical detail, offering specific product recommendations, price points, and styling notes that communications teams can expect to see integrated into her coverage.
Weddings, Travel, and Fashion Experiences
Beyond straight product coverage, Nichols extends her beat into weddings, travel, and experiential fashion stories that retain a strong aesthetic focus.
Her wedding features drill into designers, archival pieces, and detailed styling notes, as seen in her coverage of a bride who wore Danielle Frankel and vintage Ralph Lauren at a destination celebration. Travel pieces like “Inside an Editor’s Trip to Monterey Car Week,” “I Stayed at the Elegant Hotel in Tokyo That Was Just Named #15 in the World,” and guides to Aspen, Gstaad, and summer sports events frame destinations through a lens of style, highlighting outfits, packing lists, and luxury touchpoints rather than generic tourism. She also covers event-driven dressing, with editor-approved outfits for the French Open, travel outfits for frequent flyers, and alpine style pieces that capture the après-ski mood.
These stories show how she treats weddings and travel as extensions of the fashion narrative, focusing on how specific environments and occasions influence what stylish people wear.
Background in Luxury Fashion and Editorial
Nichols’s remit at Who What Wear is underpinned by a career that bridges high fashion brands and editorial publishing.
She has worked with labels including Prada, Chanel, and Tiffany & Co., experience that informs her ability to assess designer collections and accessories with insider fluency. Her personal style has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, Vogue.com, Vogue France, WWD, and the CFDA, underscoring her visibility within the industry she covers. She began her career at Rodarte, where she was involved in styling, photo shoots, and runway shows, and at Allure, where she moved into print and digital editorial work.
In her current role, she also contributes to podcasts, social content, and branded initiatives for Who What Wear, extending her influence beyond written features into other formats that still revolve around fashion authority.
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.