Kristen Tauer

Kristen Tauer follows how style, performance and visual culture intersect across art, fashion, film, theater, music and dining. She edits and writes culture coverage for the Eye section at Women’s Wear Daily, focusing on reported features, interviews and photo-led stories that show creative work in context. Her pieces tend to track the people shaping contemporary culture and the environments they build, from museum galleries and theater stages to restaurants and red carpets.

Art and Exhibition Features

Tauer’s most consistent thread is detailed reporting on contemporary art and exhibition-making. Her features on artists such as Robert Longo, Sanford Biggers, JR, Peter Saul, Judy Chicago, Futura, Rachel Feinstein and Angel Otero walk through specific shows, studio visits and retrospectives rather than treating art as a backdrop. She highlights the narrative frameworks and visual decisions behind exhibitions, tracing how themes like history, politics, identity and craft are translated into installations, large-scale images and sculptural work.

Coverage of events such as the Winter Show, an art, antiques and design fair, extends that lens to curated marketplaces, connecting exhibitors, honorees and the broader culture of collecting.

Across these stories, she spends space on how a show is staged: the layout of galleries, the materials in use, and the way a viewer moves through the work. Artist interviews tend to sit alongside close description, giving communicators clear insight into the concepts and collaborations driving each project.

The emphasis is on the intersection of art and audience, and on how visual culture is presented and consumed, not simply who is in attendance.

Fashion, Custom Dressing and Costume Stories

Within fashion, Tauer’s reporting is anchored in custom dressing and the narrative use of clothes.

Features on wedding stylists who help couples build a cohesive fashion story, and on the modern era of bespoke shopping as designers move closer to couture, look at how garments are designed and selected to support a larger narrative rather than just trend coverage. She writes in detail about fittings, fabrication and designer-client relationships, positioning custom fashion as a collaboration that shapes how a person is seen at key moments.

Her celebrity and costume coverage carries the same focus. A piece on Daniel Radcliffe’s first-time Tony nomination and his bespoke Todd Snyder look examines how tailoring and design choices respond to the stakes of an awards ceremony.

An interview with Alan Cumming about his theatrical wardrobe on “The Traitors” dissects how exaggerated silhouettes, fabrics and styling help build a distinctive on-screen persona. In a photo-driven story such as “Photos: A Closer Look at ‘The Odyssey’ Costumes,” she moves through individual looks, materials and design references to show how costumes construct the world of a production.

These stories give a granular view of clothing as storytelling, whether onstage, on television or at formal events.

Film, Music and Performance Profiles

Tauer profiles actors, musicians and performers with an eye on both career arcs and visual identity.

Pieces on Bill Skarsgård around “It Chapter 2,” Rosamund Pike on the stakes of truthful reporting, Winston Duke, Dave Franco on “The Disaster Artist” and Darren Criss in an awards-season moment link roles, projects and public reception to how they present themselves. She often ties wardrobe and styling to the characters they play and the narratives they inhabit, showing how creative choices offscreen echo or counterpoint their work onscreen.

Her music and performance coverage operates similarly. Profiles of Phoebe Bridgers, Hongjoong of Ateez and Coco Jones ahead of the Grammy weekend focus on how sound, image and fan connection come together, with attention to stagewear, video aesthetics and career milestones. Pieces on Alvin Ailey and ballerina Diana Vishneva look at dance through repertory, choreography and the visual language of movement, costumes and staging.

Interviews with figures like I.M from Monsta X around an album release link sonic direction and personal storytelling to how an artist chooses to appear and perform.

Dining and Lifestyle Culture

Tauer also writes about restaurants and dining as part of the wider cultural landscape that surrounds fashion and art.

Features on places such as Manuela, Kwame Onwuachi’s Tatiana, Coqodaq and the tasting-menu restaurant Oyatte focus on how chefs, designers and art-world collaborators build spaces that speak to a certain scene. She pays attention to interiors, clientele and programming, showing how a restaurant situates itself in relation to galleries, performance venues and fashion events.

Roundups like “Where to Eat Between Shows: Fashion Week’s Best New Restaurants” connect this dining coverage directly to the fashion calendar, mapping which new spots matter to people moving between runways and presentations. Across these stories, food is treated as part of a lifestyle ecosystem: another way culture is experienced, talked about and visually staged. For communications work tied to openings, collaborations or events in these worlds, Tauer’s reporting makes the environment as central as the announcement.