Second Life

The annual Nordstrom Anniversary Sale is live, and to celebrate, Who What Wear Shopping Director Bobby Schuessler is talking to one of the great curatorial minds behind the sale—Nordstrom Associate Fashion Director Linda Cui Zhang. In this episode, Zhang reveals the product selection process for the sale, the trends her team prioritized, and the new brands she was excited to bring into the fold this year. Plus, she shares the most covetable items to shop before they sell out, her favorite giftable beauty bundles, and the key pieces to prioritize if you’re looking to elevate or refresh your wardrobe but don’t know where to start (think seasonless Frye riding boots and versatile Vince short-sleeve wool tees). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sarah Davis is the founder and president of the luxury resale company Fashionphile. Davis was a self-proclaimed “debate nerd” during her teens and had early aspirations of becoming a lawyer. After earning her undergrad, she quickly enrolled in law school at the University of Maryland. Growing up, Davis had become accustomed to taking odd jobs to pay for things like clothing, so she applied that same mentality to putting herself through school. To make money, she cut boys’ hair in the dorms and even started a peer-to-peer used lawbook platform with her brother-in-law called lawswap.com. She also began selling her belongings on eBay for extra cash, and that’s when she realized that there was a largely untapped market for luxury resale. In 1999, she created a storefront on eBay called Fashionphile, focused on reselling luxury handbags, and was soon able to make enough money to pay off her student loans. Although Davis did graduate from law school and even pass the bar, she had found her true passion in growing her resale business and decided to opt out of pursuing a law career. She ran Fashionphile on eBay for the first several years of the business before bringing her brother-in-law into the fold and legitimizing the brand with its own website. Today, over 25 years later, Fashionphile is the largest platform in the country for buying and selling pre-owned, ultra-luxury accessories. The brand now has headquarters in San Diego and New York City, an office in Tokyo, and retail locations all across the country. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, Senior Fashion Editor Eliza Huber—Who What Wear’s resident expert on the intersection of sports and fashion—is sitting down with two stylists behind some of the best tunnel fashion we’ve seen in recent months. Brittany Hampton is a seasoned athlete stylist whose client roster includes some of the buzziest women in basketball: Paige Bueckers, Sabrina Ionescu, Cameron Brink, Evan Mobley, and Nika Mühl. She’s also the Golden State Valkyries’ fashion strategist. Manny Jay began his styling career working with musicians like Trippie Redd and Tink, and more recently manifested his way into the sports arena through his work with WNBA tunnel ’fit veteran Skylar Diggins-Smith. Today, Hampton and Jay discuss the WNBA’s unprecedented growth over the last year and how that heightened visibility impacts their clients’ relationships with fashion. They get into the ways that athlete fashion extends beyond aesthetics, influencing fan accessibility, marketing avenues for players, and even their on-court performance. Check out Eliza’s Go Sports content here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Denise Woodard is the founder and CEO of Partake, an allergy-friendly food company. Woodard started her career in pound-the-pavement sales roles at Philip Morris and FedEx, gaining robust experience in winning business by providing genuine solutions to her clients. She then spent the majority of her early career at the Coca-Cola Company, starting in sales and then finding her niche working on the emerging brands that were better aligned with her values, like Honest Tea and Health-Ade. After rising through the ranks and becoming the director of national sales for Coca-Cola’s Venturing and Emerging Brands (VEB), Woodard was proud of the career she had built for herself and didn’t envision she’d ever leave her job. But after having her daughter, Vivienne, and finding out her child suffered from food allergies, she started to realize just how stark the allergy-friendly food landscape was. She couldn’t find any options that were nutritious and delicious, and after some nudging from her nanny, Woodard decided to do something about it. She promptly put together a new business pitch for an allergy-friendly snack brand, entered a pitch competition, and won. She spent the next year building Partake while working her day job before leaping into it full-time. Since then, Woodard has become the first Black woman to raise over $1 million for a packaged food company, and Partake Foods can now be found in over 18,000 retailers, including Target and Whole Foods. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ron Robinson is the founder of BeautyStat and the cosmetic chemist behind Hailey Bieber’s skincare line, Rhode. Robinson began his career at Clinique in the ’90s and, over the past two decades, has worked on products for industry giants like Revlon, Avon, L’Oréal, and Lancôme. He launched BeautyStat as an educational platform for beauty enthusiasts in 2009 but ultimately moved into developing his own product line in 2019 with the launch of his groundbreaking, ultra-potent vitamin C formulation. Celebs took notice, and Hailey Bieber quickly reached out to bring him on as a partner in what would become Rhode. In this episode, Robinson chats with Who What Wear Beauty Director Erin Jahns about the science behind successful products and which ingredients are worth the hype. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Alyssa Wasko Stein is the founder and designer of Los Angeles–based womenswear brand Donni. Stein has had entrepreneurial tendencies since childhood, but she didn’t always know her love of fashion would take her down the designer path. She studied a different part of the fashion industry (retailing and consumer sciences) and secured a coveted internship in Chanel’s visual merchandising department during college. But after her father’s passing at the beginning of her sophomore year, Stein sought out a creative outlet for her grief. She began handmaking and selling scarves, naming the business Donni Charm after her father, Donald. Stein slowly grew her side business while continuing to work at Chanel after graduating, but after some early wholesale success, she decided to focus on Donni Charm full-time. She moved operations to Los Angeles and rebranded to simply Donni. Most significantly, though, she stumbled into designing ready-to-wear clothing, as she wanted specific pieces to style with her scarves. While Stein had no prior clothing design experience, it came naturally to her, and she surprised herself with a full line of 30 SKUs within four weeks, laying the groundwork for the Donni we know and love today. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For our second annual Who What Wear 100 Beauty Awards, Beauty Director Erin Jahns is joined by beauty editors Jamie Schneider, Kaitlyn McLintock, and Maya Thomas for a roundtable discussion about all of their favorite products. After spending months testing items from the buzziest new brands and the industry giants, the team has narrowed their top picks down to 100 items across haircare, skincare, makeup, bodycare, tools, nails, and fragrance. Warning: You may want to listen to this episode with your beauty retailer of choice’s website open for easy, add-to-cart access. The Who What Wear Beauty 100 story is live, so check out the full list here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Katie Sturino is the founder of Megababe, the innovative beauty brand known for nontoxic, cult-favorite products like Thigh Rescue and Bust Dust. She's also a body-acceptance advocate with a highly engaged community of close to one million supporters across platforms. Sturino joined Hillary Kerr on Second Life back in 2020 to talk about her winding career path from PR to social media to beauty (listen to her first episode here), but we had to have her back on to discuss her most recent pivot to fiction writing. In this episode, Sturino shares why she decided to write her debut novel, Sunny Side Up, and gets refreshingly candid about the challenges of continuing to transform your career when everyone has feedback. She opens up about what it's like to work with a ghostwriter and where she hopes to take this creative endeavor moving forward. Of course, she also catches us up on the last five years of bootstrapped growth for Megababe and shares what's on the horizon for the business. Buy Sturino's new book, Sunny Side Up, here! (It's Hillary Kerr approved.) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ann Foley is the costume designer behind the grounded and detailed wardrobes of the hit show The Last of Us. In this episode, Foley (whose extensive career also includes work on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and She Hulk) sits down with Who What Wear Senior Fashion and Social Media Editor Tara Gonzalez to discuss the costume design process for The Last of Us season 2. Foley shares the journey of developing character-driven styles, the inspiration behind the apocalyptic fashion and how it reflected the different environments, and the subtle styling changes that marked character growth after a five-year time jump. She reveals the challenges of costuming an apocalyptic world, why The Last of Us is technically a period piece, the significance of specific items like Joel's jacket and Ellie's Converse, and the collaborative process with actors and showrunners that brought the characters to life. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action, a prominent grassroots organization fighting gun violence in the United States. She initially aspired to be an investigative journalist, and she earned a journalism degree but transitioned into a career in public relations, spending nearly two decades in corporate communications at companies like Anthem and GE Healthcare. After taking a step back from her career to become a stay-at-home mom, the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012 spurred her into action, and she founded Moms Demand Action with a simple Facebook group. Leveraging her communications and branding expertise, she transformed the group into a powerful nationwide movement, now part of Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country, with nearly 11 million supporters. She has since been recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and a Forbes 50 Over 50 Changemaker. She’s also authored books including Fight Like a Mother and Fired Up. Buy Shannon’s new book here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Emilia Wickstead is a New Zealand–born, London-based fashion designer known for her refined yet playful approach to feminine dressing. Since launching in 2008, she’s evolved her namesake brand from a made-to-measure model to producing seasonal ready-to-wear collections, shown at London Fashion Week for the past 13 years, and expanded into bridalwear. In this episode, Wickstead joins Senior Fashion Editor Anna LaPlaca to discuss her early design influences, the trademarks of an Emilia Wickstead piece, and how she selects artistic muses for her cinematic collections. Wickstead also shares which pieces to shop from her pre-fall collection and details on her upcoming collaborations with the Palm Heights Hotel and Paperless Post. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jessica Malaty Rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator renowned for making complex public health information accessible, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. While initially premed at USC, she pivoted to studying health promotion and disease prevention, and worked in the nonprofit sector after college. She was later recruited to research emerging biological threats at Georgetown University and simultaneously decided to pursue a master’s degree there in biohazardous threat agents and emerging infectious diseases. While she’s always loved science, she began to realize that where she truly excelled was in “speaking science.” And the deeper Rivera got into infectious disease epidemiology—whether through work or academia—the more she realized how critical the communications aspect of science was to public health. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she joined The Atlantic to lend her expertise to the COVID Tracking Project to provide publicly available, comprehensive data on COVID-19 cases in real time. She then began using Instagram to explain and interpret global health news, unexpectedly gaining a large following for her easy-to-understand information. Over the past five years, she has grown her platform, launched a Substack, and is currently completing a Doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, all while remaining dedicated to science facts and public health literacy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kathleen Felix-Hager is the Emmy Award–winning costume designer behind the vibrant and evolving wardrobes of the hit show Hacks. Felix-Hager, whose extensive career also includes work on Veep and Dexter, sits down with Who What Wear Editorial Director Lauren Eggertsen to delve into the sartorial world of Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels. In this episode, Felix-Hager shares the journey of developing distinct styles for each character, the inspiration behind Deborah's maximalist looks drawn from her own grandmother, and the thoughtful elevation of Ava's wardrobe through four seasons. She reveals the challenges of costuming a comedy, the evolution of Ava's infamous cropped pants, and the collaborative process with actors and showrunners that brings these characters to life. Shop our editor's eBay picks here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Anushka Salinas is the CEO of the parenting tech company Nanit. Salinas began her career as an assistant buyer at Lord & Taylor, discovering her love for fashion and business data. She then pursued her MBA and serendipitously met the founders of the groundbreaking clothing rental company Rent the Runway when it was still just an idea. She began working for the company as an unpaid intern during business school, and then, upon graduation, left a secure job offer behind to continue growing the business, eventually becoming Rent the Runway’s VP of merchandising. She went on to apply her e-commerce expertise to Hudson’s Bay and a start-up called Resonance before returning to Rent the Runway to run its subscription business, and then ultimately become its president. Then, in 2024, Salinas pivoted again to lead yet another groundbreaking company, this time in the parenting space. Salinas joined Nanit, a technology company revolutionizing baby monitors with AI insights, offering a data-driven approach to modern parenting. Under her leadership, Nanit continues to innovate and expand, becoming an essential tool for families navigating the joys and challenges of raising children. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Christos Garkinos, the self-proclaimed "Robin Hood of fashion," joins Who What Wear Market Director Bobby Schuessler to unpack his winding career, from growing up working in his family's Greek restaurant to becoming a reality TV personality and pioneering the world of luxury resale. Garkinos grew up infatuated with the Home Shopping Network, and after stints at big corporations like Clorox and Disney, he began to forge his own path in the resale market. He opened a store, starred in Bravo's Dukes of Melrose, joined HSN as a host, and then ultimately found his niche selling his curated goods on Instagram Live during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode, Garkinos discusses how he turned his pandemic project into Covet by Christos, an Instagram shopping network that now airs seven days a week. Plus, he shares which vintage items are trending and what brands are the most valuable to collect right now. Buy Christos’ book here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Courtney Claghorn is the co-founder of Sugared + Bronzed, the nation’s largest sugaring and sunless tanning destination. Claghorn's journey began in 2010, out of her Santa Monica apartment, while juggling a full-time job in the fintech industry. After becoming dissatisfied with the high prices and underwhelming experiences of local spray tanning, she saw a gap in the market, and with just $1000 and encouragement from her then-boyfriend (now-husband and co-founder), she started offering her own services. Over the past 15 years, Sugared + Bronzed has grown exponentially, now boasting over 35 locations nationwide—with 10 more in the pipeline—as well as a thriving e-commerce business. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tom Broecker is the costume designer of the legendary NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live. Broecker, who has been with the show for over three decades, is responsible for the design and creation of all of the costumes for the show—sometimes creating up to 200 for just one episode. Today on the podcast, he joins Who What Wear Co-Founder and Chief Content Officer Hillary Kerr to discuss the intricate process of creating iconic character costumes under tight weekly deadlines. He shares behind-the-scenes stories about the show's 50th anniversary, the massive costume archive, and the blend of psychology and resourcefulness needed to dress characters from Bill Hader as Stefon to Bowen Yang as the iceberg that sank the Titanic. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Angela Vranich is the co-founder and chief product officer of the baby-and-kids food brand Little Spoon. Angela jump-started her career while still in college by founding a nationwide organic food marketing company. After graduation, she got a job in television, producing culinary competition reality shows out of Philadelphia. But she quickly realized it wasn’t for her. After a cross-country move to be with her then-boyfriend (now husband and co-founder), who ran an organic foods distribution company, she began to think about what food categories on the market were due for a shake-up. She realized that the baby-food space had been dominated by the same single player for nearly 90 years—and set out to change that. The result is Little Spoon, launched in 2017, which offers fresh-cooked baby food made with organic ingredients. Little Spoon sold a million meals in its first year, and in the years since, it has expanded to include all types of meals for children up to 10 years old. Today, they’re the #1 online destination for kids' food and have delivered more than 35 million meals to families nationwide. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Prabal Gurung is a world-renowned Nepalese American fashion designer who established his eponymous label in 2009. In this episode, Gurung joins Senior Fashion and Social Media Editor Tara Gonzalez to discuss the origins of his brand—from his childhood in Nepal and India to becoming a prominent New York–based designer—and his newly published memoir, Walk Like a Girl (order a copy here!). He also shares insights into his design philosophy of “West meets East” rather than “East meets West,” his experience dressing notable figures like Michelle Obama and Sarah Jessica Parker, and the role that joy, resilience, and authenticity play in his work. Shop our editor's eBay picks here! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rosie Johnston is the founder of the clean fragrance line By Rosie Jane. Johnston originally trained as a makeup artist and began working in London, then moved to Los Angeles, where she continued to build her skills and clientele. In 2003, she founded Rosie Jane Cosmetics, which offered an ahead-of-its-time multipurpose lip and cheek pot. While the venture didn’t last, she realized she had a love and knack for making her own products. She then created her signature scent, wearing it to shoots, hoping that it would make her memorable to clients and help her to book more jobs. But when clients and friends began asking to purchase the scent, something clicked. She began producing larger quantities, and soon after, By Rosie Jane was born. Since launching in 2010, By Rosie Jane has expanded from one scent to seven. It's also formulated perfumes, perfume oils, and a suite of bodycare products. The brand is consistently one of Sephora’s top-selling fragrance brands, and last year reached $10 million in revenue, making it one of the most recognizable clean fragrance brands on the market today. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.