Erin Walsh—the Stylist Behind Anne Hathaway, Selena Gomez, and More—Wrote a Book to Help You Get Dressed
Should getting dressed be that complicated? No, but it should be that deep. “With Erin’s help, I have found a style that I feel has expanded to fit my life,” Hathaway writes in the book’s foreword. “As my stress about clothes has decreased, a certain boldness and joy has emerged. I find I am more adventurous, and that has made me connect more deeply to feeling powerful. There are so many things in the world I can’t control. How I feel about the daily choice of what I wear is something I can… The gift of this book is that Erin has made clear that the only thing you need to dress well—an entirely personal definition— is an understanding of what your life needs and the self-worth to want to feel your best.”Read on as Walsh breaks down her methodology and reveals what about fashion, style, and getting dressed people seem to misunderstand the most.This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.José Criales-Unzueta: You wrote a book! Congratulations. It’s such a good premise, to dress with intention.Erin Walsh: That was the intention, no pun intended. The book took a while to finally manifest itself, but in terms of what it is and who it speaks to, it feels like something that’s been needed for so, so long. Especially being a working mom for 10 years now, everybody I know, every woman I know, is looking for alignment and purpose and substance in their lives, especially when things feel overwhelming or chaotic or even intentionless when we get caught up in all the doing that we’re doing. I’ve always found and felt this purpose to beauty and to style. But the book was a means for me to make a method of that and make it into a reality. It’s been so rewarding. And the weird thing is, even after making the book, my life has been more chaotic than ever. Leaning into these ideas has become more important for me than it ever has, and I’m realizing that they’re more true than I even knew when I wrote them into reality.For the book, you developed a methodology for style you call CREATE. Can you walk me through that? What does it stand for, and where did it come from?The actual acronym is funny. I knew that it was really important to me for the book to be as actionable and accessible to as many kinds of people as possible. And so was like, what’s the takeaway? How’s somebody going to digest this? I knew there had to be an acronym. And I knew that my method, what I’d been doing, was this multi-pronged quest for alignment and grounding and foundational support and manifestation and telling your story through what you wear and continuing to grow. But I hadn’t put it into an acronym yet. It came to me in five seconds. I just wrote, vertically, CREATE. I liked the word. And then I just wrote one after the other: Clarity, ritual, editing, alignment, truth, and expansion.Clarity, which is step number one, is getting clear on who you are and how you want to feel. This is something I talk with Diane von Furstenberg in the book too, about the means to refining yourself and staying tethered to your integrity. So clarity, that first step of looking in the mirror, getting vulnerable with yourself, is your baseline. The book is sitting at this intersection of style and wellness, or style and spirituality. I really believe it’s whatever is bigger than you that you believe in that supports you. And even if you don’t believe in that, just allowing yourself to feel supported, whatever you call it, is important. Deciding every day to reboot and recalibrate, that ritual that has to happen before you go into your closet. That’s the fun part about it.
