One Year of Look One with Natalie Tauger

How long have you been a stylist, and how did you end up a stylist?

I’ve been a stylist now for probably ten years. I was an intern at Interview Magazine – actually before that I was an intern at Us Weekly. I would do the ‘Who Wore It Best’s and I would just lie and choose for myself. Then I started working with Karl Templer for many years, and I started doing things on my own about a year and a half ago around when I started Look One, which was almost exactly a year ago. 

So you knew from the beginning of your career that you wanted to be a stylist? 

I didn’t even know what that was! I sort of knew the names of people from that book ‘Stylist’ [Stylist: The Interpreters of Fashion] that Vogue put out but I didn’t really know what it meant. I remember people saying ‘oh, that’s good styling, or that’s bad styling’, and to me they looked exactly the same, – I didn’t have a trained eye. But I developed it over time, and really working with Karl, I always say that experience was an education equal to if not greater than going to college. 

So right after working with Karl, you started doing your own stuff, pulling away from assisting…

I became the fashion director of Karl’s company around six years ago, and was doing a lot under the umbrella of the company. I would do fashion shows in China and Italy, and do a lot of consulting work… then I decided it was probably time to try something else, and from there I thought maybe it would be cool if I took the picture too. I’m such a chronically online person, so how do I turn that obsession into a healthy hobby, rather than a mind-rotting hobby?

Look One integrates a lot of familiar ideas of a fashion platform, but is unique and unlike other types of blogs or personal styling projects – Where was your head at when you decided to start this project? 

I felt that everybody I knew was interacting with fashion photography first and foremost on their phones. So, even if you were someone who went to the newsstand, you were probably seeing the pictures before on your phone and getting into it that way. The other inspiration was really Wordle – you know the word game? I love Wordle, I still play it everyday, and I think the reason I still love it is because you can only play one a day. I felt there is this intrigue of, what’s gonna come next? Is it a model I know, is it a model I don’t know? What’s the look? What’s the style? And that was really the genesis of it. As I became more confident as a photographer, I became more ambitious, and started going outside, and making sets. But it was really to feed what I felt was an obsession with looks. Even when I go on dates with guys, they’re talking about fits and their fit-pics. 

There’s something intriguing about it being a one-off thing. 

And people are obsessed with it. People care so much more about the outfit than the photograph. 

As a stylist, I’ve been wondering how you’re logistically pulling this off. Are you pulling from brands and PRs? 

Yeah! I’m pulling from people. Almost everything in the show is from a designer that leant. It was harder in the beginning, and then it became easier as people saw the work. When I do a shoot, I typically do it over the course of a week, and do like ten models a day every day. I’ve actually only done five shoots, and that’s lasted me the year. 

That’s crazy… and you’ve done how many looks total? 

I’ve done 275 looks total. 

And you're casting it…

Through Anita Bitton and her team at Establishment. And then every so often I see people on instagram who I think are cool, and I’ll ask her to look them up. 

It’s funny, because I was under the impression that you were shooting way more constantly. 

I mean when I do it, it takes up a month of my life. And there have been so many contributors that have been really helpful, but at the end of the day it’s really me. Like I’m really the only one, there’s no producer that helps. So it’s a full time gig. 

Still though, you’re pumping out so many looks in that short time period of a week or so… how do you avoid creative burnout? 

Without sounding cocky, that isn’t a challenge for me – that is the easy part for me. There are so many outfits, there are so many styles… it's exponential! And everything is changing constantly. Even at an event like tonight where someone turned up who had never heard of me before but saw it on instagram from Miami and just happened to be here… I have a lot of people who are inspiring me in this process. I saw somebody on the street in fucking Disneyworld, and wanted to copy that outfit. 

To me, you’ve created a sort of dream scenario as a stylist, because you have a creative laboratory that you get to experiment within. 

It’s purely selfish. It’s so indulgent. I look at the walls [in the exhibition] and I feel like they’re just little pieces of candy. I’m so thrilled in that sense, and it’s delicious – that’s the best word I can think of to describe it. 

Where did you start – what was your first LookOne look? 

I know exactly what she was wearing – a black asymmetrical MM6 dress, and she had a glove going through the dress. I did around thirty days of it before I really told anyone, so then when people looked at the account they would think ’oh, shit’. The launch day was Alex Consani as a bride, and then from there it more became this process of doing looks. Sometimes when you’re doing a shoot, you’ll like the fitting picture against the white background more than you like the actual fucking shoot. So at first I was going to print the pictures out, scan them, number them, write the credits on it. But then I started to get more ambitious because I’m a Virgo, and I wasn’t just going to leave it at that if I could get better. 

So from your first look, because you have been experimenting in such a large capacity, do you feel like your style in your other work or personal style has been influenced? 

Not really. The way I dress is so uniform, I have a silhouette that I really like, and I only wear Alaïa – that’s my thing. In my other work, still not really… I think it’s very instinctual, and I’m always thinking about what’s going to make an interesting picture. What’s helpful is being so inspired by the cast. There’s a symbiotic relationship of Anita and her team sending me all the models that are in town, then getting to fit those people into my little fantasy world. I’m so lucky that so many people have wanted to partake in it. 

What is one look that you felt was a turning point for LookOne? 

I think the biggest turning point was when I started shooting outside. Originally all the looks were being shot against white, but when I started going outside I thought ‘Oh my god, this just got so much easier,’ because I could work better with natural light, and didn’t have to be so concerned with getting the lighting right.

How did you decide to curate this exhibit and showcase everything in this way? 

So, I knew I wanted to do an exhibit, and putting it on the wall made me realize – it kind of is a moodboard. I didn’t want to treat it too preciously in part because I love the feeling that I’m walking into a teenager’s bedroom. Also because a lot happened because of naivete – I’m not a trained photographer, so this is the first time I’ve printed anything, I had to learn how to size things correctly. I think it suits the nature of what I’m doing. 

So what was Devon’s role as curator? 

I’m friends with Devon Lee Carlson – I love her vibe, and I think she is a curator in so many senses of the word. She’s so thoughtful in that sense, and she is so much more than an influencer or model. She has her finger on the pulse in a very exciting way. From there we had a dialogue and whittled it down to 200 pictures texting back and forth. It was really about having the conversation of who are her favorites, what excites her, and inspires her. She has been a supporter from day one, before Alex [Consani]. 

Does she have a look? 

Yes! Her print is up downstairs. That’s coming out, probably in a week. There’s a print of Sydney as well, her sister. 

Talk about the community that you have built around LookOne working with so many people in such short spans of time.

The community has been the most unexpected joy of this entire thing. When I do this, it’s just me and the model a lot of the time if we go out on the street, and we get thirty minutes to an hour of uninterrupted face-on-face time. I’ve met so many people with so many different and amazing life stories. Another great joy has been meeting a lot of women who are older, and getting to hear about their lives as models when they were much younger, if they shot with Avedon, if they shot with Newton… I also have tried to make a point of shooting women of different ages and women of different sizes in ways that maybe other people haven’t tapped into, making sure that they are being seen through the lens of fashion with a capital F just like everybody else. The whole thing has been about fashion with a capital F, that’s what I like. 

What do you see coming next?

I feel the sky's the limit, I won’t rest until I have complete world domination. A lot of people tonight have been giving me a lot of inspiring ideas about whether I should do a book, or if I should take this on the road, and I’m open! Give me a call.