Robyn Merrett
Robyn Merrett covers the intersection of music, celebrity relationships and fashion, centering her stories on how artists and their circles show up at weddings, red carpets and other high-profile events. At People she brings a style-forward lens to music-adjacent celebrity news, turning performances, romances and ceremonies into detailed portraits of what everyone wore and how those choices land in the wider culture. Across fashion and beauty roles at outlets including StyleCaster, Us Weekly and People, she has spent nearly a decade shaping coverage that connects celebrity style to bigger cultural moments.
Love on the Carpet
Merrett’s work often treats the red carpet as a narrative setting where relationships and style unfold together. At Us Weekly she has put couples at the centre of awards coverage, as in roundups of “Love on the Carpet” and Emmys couple style moments that track how coordinated looks tell a story about romance and status. In these packages she zooms in on how partners dress in sync or contrast, and how their shared appearance contributes to the night’s visual hierarchy.
That same attention to pairing and presence carries into her People coverage of music-world events, where she anchors stories in who attended, who arrived together and how their outfits played against the soundtrack of the occasion.
Show-Stopping Fashion Moments
Merrett is drawn to the kind of fashion moments that define an era of pop culture, and she builds features around those images. Her Us Weekly work on Zendaya’s “show-stopping fashion moments” at the Emmys and beyond underscores a focus on repeat performances: how one star’s style evolves across carpets, and which looks crystallise into touchstones. She has covered major style stages including the Met Gala and New York Fashion Week, treating them as recurring chapters in the story of celebrity self-presentation. Interviews with figures such as Alicia Keys about her Keys Soulcare brand show how she connects beauty and fashion choices to the persona of a musician, reading products and partnerships as part of a broader aesthetic strategy. Even in event-driven pieces, Merrett tends to stay with the clothes and glam details long enough to explain why a look felt “wow” in the moment and why it matters to fans watching from afar.
Rule-Breaking Wedding Looks
Wedding coverage is a consistent strand of Merrett’s reporting, and she emphasises style decisions that bend tradition. Her People piece on Zoë Kravitz attending Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding focuses on the beaded sheer dress Kravitz chose and the significance of going solo to such a music and sports crossover celebration, framing the outfit as both fashion statement and social signal. Her coverage of Afshan Azad’s wedding, where Harry Potter castmates reunited, similarly blends guest list details with what everyone wore, presenting the ceremony as a cultural reunion staged through clothes. In more recent work on Sophia Bush and Ashlyn Harris’s “rule-breaking wedding looks,” she highlights unconventional choices and how they reflect the couple’s values, turning dress codes into a reading of character and relationship dynamics. Across these stories, Merrett treats the wedding aisle as another kind of performance venue, where the styling of musicians, actors and athletes carries as much meaning as any speech or song.
Lives and Breathes Everything Fashion and Beauty
Merrett’s ability to report music and celebrity through a style lens is grounded in deep experience as a fashion and beauty editor. She has held senior roles overseeing fashion and beauty coverage at Us Weekly and StyleCaster, where she managed verticals, set trend agendas and produced service, commerce and culture pieces that moved between product, runway and celebrity.
Her work includes trend forecasting, coverage of sales and shopping moments, and the translation of runway or tour visuals into accessible styling ideas.
She now brings that editorial discipline to broader entertainment news leadership, including a news editor role at InStyle, while continuing to maintain an independent fashion newsletter and content platform that offers outfit inspiration, styling tips and sharp fashion commentary. The through-line across these positions is a clear point of view: Merrett treats fashion and beauty as core parts of how music and celebrity stories are told, and she structures her reporting so that the clothes and glam are never an afterthought but the frame through which the story is seen.
4 more music journalists.
Abby Webster
Abby Webster zeroes in on the storytelling side of contemporary pop, writing for Billboard about how songs build worlds around K-pop groups, fictional pop stars and ambitious soundtracks. She covers K-pop projects through close, song-by-song features, like her track-by-track piece with SEVENTEEN’s Vernon and The 8 on their EP ‘V8,’ and fan-centered lists such as “7 Best Moments from BTS’ Long-Awaited Return.” She treats soundtracks and fictional acts with the same rigor, mapping the inspirations behind “The Vampire Lestat” soundtrack and profiling in-universe groups like HUNTR/X and Saja Boys as if they were chart acts. Through Chart Beat stories on projects like “KPop Demon Hunters,” she connects these releases to industry strategy, global fandom, and the business systems that turn pop narratives into durable IP.
Alex Suskind
Alex Suskind is a freelance writer and editor who covers music with concise news stories and curated release lists. He focuses on new songs, album roundups, and archival access, from Carly Rae Jepsen’s “On Wires” to Neil Young opening his full catalog to residents of Greenland. His reporting stays close to the release cycle and foregrounds the core hook of each story. He has written for Pitchfork and has freelance work in Vulture, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. He also covers broader arts and culture, but his music beat is built around what is newly out now or newly available.
Ali Shutler
Ali Shutler links chart pop, alternative music and fan culture with the ways songs move through festivals, streaming platforms and games. He is a freelance culture journalist specialising in music, writing news and features for NME and other music and culture titles. He covers breakout chart acts, legacy artists whose catalogues are resurfacing, and how audiences rediscover songs via TikTok, streaming or in‑game soundtracks. His reporting on streaming-era pop and live festival moments tracks virality, catalog access and fan behaviour as part of the story of a track. He also examines music, gaming and visual art crossovers, treating game soundtracks and artist-led campaigns as part of a wider cultural map. Alongside this, he profiles emerging chart artists for outlets including The Telegraph, Vice, The Independent, Dork and Upset, focusing on early-career trajectories and fan culture.
Annette Sharp
Annette Sharp is a veteran gossip and entertainment columnist known for direct, opinion-led coverage of celebrity power struggles and reputational crises across television and the music industry. She now writes high-profile columns for the masthead, after a decade on a well-read gossip column and a move to News Corp in 2008. Her real beat is the friction between public image and behind-the-scenes behaviour on flagship TV programs, including breakfast shows, reality formats and other long-running franchises. She focuses on who drives conflicts, who is exposed and who benefits, using ratings history, production decisions and industry mechanics as context. Sharp covers on-air personalities, executives, advisers and musicians, treating television and music as workplaces with competing egos, contracts and alliances, and blending reporting, media commentary and critique in a narrative column format.