One Year of Look One with Natalie Tauger

February 17, 2024

Look One entered the social media sphere cloaked in mystique — early encounters left many puzzled about its origins and trajectory. A year later, Natalie Tauger, the architect of the platform, has made it clear that Look One is not another run-of-the-mill DIY project; her ambitions are far more acute. Behind the scenes, nearly a decade of expertise guides her styling choices, with countless models cast and Tauger single-handedly overseeing photography, styling, production, and rollout. To mark Look One's first anniversary, Tauger celebrated with a one-night-only exhibition during fashion week, showcasing the platform's most delicious images, curated by friend and Look One model, Devon Lee Carlson.

The exhibition drew a crowd of friends, contributors, and former Look One models, eager to snap a photo next to their look pasted up on the wall. By working with so many models and collaborators, Tauger has generated an incidental but inevitable community around the platform. We pulled Natalie out of the her crowded basement exhibition opening to reflect on the intentions and the impacts of her brainchild.

By Kaia Carioli
Photography by Born, Cade Halvorson, and Greer Jones

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.

Fashion

Happy 424 Day!

Simon Rasmussen — What's going on?

Guillermo Andrade — Right now we're just setting everything up.

So, what are you doing, is it a party?

Well, I kind of felt universally forced, right? Because 4/24/24, I was just like, I don’t really have a choice here. The stars also just kind of aligned, so to be honest, I got this settlement that came with a bunch of clothes so I had this idea to give back to the kids who fuck with us by allowing them to buy our shit first. Not handing stuff out for free, but to do it in a way where we could skip the middleman of the industry, so to speak, and not allow clothes to disappear into the abyss of Farfetch or whatever else. So what we’re going to do is a sort of warehouse sale, which we’ve never done before so that was really exciting for me. I didn’t want to do just another warehouse sale, so it’s like a sample sale turns rager. We teamed up with Adidas and a couple of other sponsors, then drinks, DJs, and a performance.

Sick, I love it.

Yeah. My dream sample sale. Also, it’s not just hoodies and t-shirts here in there, it’s proper collections from the past three seasons. I’m also not picking and choosing, trying to make it accessible, like this was the only way I could afford to buy shit when I was a kid, bro. Sample sales were the thing I looked forward to the most.

I feel you. In New York, there's the annual CDG sale, which is when I used to cop all my CDG.

The only time I could afford Rick. I flew to New York once for a Rick sample sale and I was like, Wow, I can't believe I got invited. And it was mental. I still have those pieces. I will never sell them. Not even because I got 'em cheap. It was also just really fun. Even on the flight to New York, I was like, I can't believe I'm going to New York for a sample sale, what a fucking loser I am. But it was like the adult version of when I was a kid and I was like, Wow, I can't believe I'm 20-something and I'm still doing the thing I was doing in high school. So I hope we can create moments like that for kids here in LA.

Yeah. I love that. It’s important to connect with them; they’re essentially creating the brand. If you don't have them, good luck.

I mean, yeah. Fuck, bro. It's cool that we've been around for this long. I mean, it got a little rocky there for a second I think, for all of us. So coming out of it, tomorrow is a celebration. And it’s like an odd day of the week. It's a Wednesday, super random. And now that we've set it up, the homies are all like, Yo, I'm coming. I'm coming. Let me jump on stage, let me do this, and that's really what it's always been about. It's not some other strategy to get likes on the internet.

That’s how the best things happen, you just couldn’t help yourself. It was intuitive.

Yeah, it all came together in a really nice way.

Would you say that’s how 424 started as well? I remember we met in like 2010 on Fairfax and I was visiting with Rasmus…

Oh bro, it’s probably the time when I started the branch… do you remember Cecilia from Black Dakini? She’s the one that introduced me to CIFF and honestly, I didn’t even care what she was doing, I was just like, I’m coming, I’ll go with you. She said she’d give me half of her booth and I said, Awesome count me in. At the time, I had just gotten my green card and I wasn't allowed to ever leave America, so Copenhagen was one of the first cities I went to when I could finally travel. I mean, you see what we did at CIFF bro? It became our fucking hub for half a decade.

That was a moment for sure.

I remember the first account I got was Antonioli, and he came super gangster, being like, You're going to sell me these clothes. And I was like, bro, I didn't come to sell clothes. I'm just kind of catching a vibe with my homie and I made these things. And he's like, No, you're going to sell it to me. And then I was like, Oh my god that’s Claudio Antonioli. So then I went home, I googled wholesale, and figured that shit out. [laughs]

[Laughs]

Like you said, I couldn't help myself, but I didn't just make t-shirts and hoodies either. I was really on my Rick wave, so I made my version of the Rick things. It was that meets like The Boondock Saints, because I'm still a little bit of a Cali bro, sort of rock kid, but not really. I like hip-hop, but I like the way the rock stars look. I like the contrast. I thought it was cool. After that, I just never stopped.

It was clear to me when I first met you that you were onto your own thing in LA. It made a lot of sense, and it was so cool. It was before 424 was its own brand; you just had the store and this really cool curation.

It was all my shit, bro. I was very, very invested in sharing all of these things that I was finding from all over the world, like Astrid Anderson. She was one of those designers at the time, so important to 424. The connection to Copenhagen specifically for me was huge. I had a big fan base there. It was incredible. And then here in LA, we were sharing the things that we were a part of and finding; it was still the early days of Fear of God, Rhude, Martine Rose. A lot of these brands, we were the first store to ever sell it — we were selling Hood By Air on the West Coast.

You had Rick as well, I remember.

Oh yeah. It took me a long time. But I got Rick, bro. By the time I had to close the store on Fairfax, I already had a Raf Simons account. I had reached my ultimate dream. It was really all the stuff I wanted to wear at the time. It was dope. The best of the best.

We had an office magazine newsstand in there as well.

Oh yeah, we did! I came to visit the one you had, and I was like, Yo, I got to bring this whole fucking thing over here. But yeah, in LA, after two days people forget you exist, but everyone’s been super supportive. We’re all 10 years older now. We've been around forever at this point.

It can be dangerous to take those breaks when you’re figuring shit out, but there’s something very genuine to this comeback you’re having.

Thank you, thank you. We’ve been in and out of those fucking showrooms in Paris for long enough. I've been in and out of these factories for the past 10 years of my life. We had to figure something out. And I think now really diving in, being in Italy full time and being there to develop these products over time, I think that the whole thing just really shows the suppliers respect you more. The people who are making your goods understand why you're making them. And I think now I finally got to the place where I'm not making Italian things, I’m making my clothes, I'm making Cali-centric shit, but with that European technicality and execution. With this Fall / Winter collection, it clicked.

So what’s the vision for the next year? What are you manifesting?

I'm just fucking relentless, bro. This is the way I want to live my life. Now that we are more aligned, more prepared, and have more experience, moving forward it is just more of becoming a fully functioning company that can provide and create opportunities for all of the people around me. We’ve been operating just on instinct for a long time.

Sustaining a business is scary, trust me I know.

Scary as fuck, dog. I just opened a store next to Bottega, bro, and it’s like what am I even doing? You have to just believe in the thing you're doing more than anybody else.

100%, and it seems like that’s what you’re doing.

And fashion’s kind of a competitive sport, as much as people don’t think it is. We can reach a certain level without losing ourselves. My biggest ambition at the moment is to create something that, when you leave one of our neighbors you come into our place you don’t feel that the level has been sacrificed at all. And it’s not easy.

Definitely. I wish I could be there tomorrow.

Thank you, bro. 10 years now. You’ve always shown me so much love. We have to do a booth or have the office part of the next 424 day. Shit let’s do a 424 day in New York.

That would be sick. Let's do it. I'm here. Let’s catch up soon.

Next season’s right around the corner so I’ll see you in Paris.

Yes, see you in Paris and Happy 424 day!

Fashion

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Words and photos by Izzy Capulong

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The Puta collection will be available exclusively on emcee.

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