The day before sitting down with Chloe Malle and Nicole Phelps for The Run-Through, Paloma Elsesser hosted a backyard barbecue for 35 people at her Brooklyn home, complete with a trio of homemade mocktails and her little brother on the grill. She carries that same thoughtfulness into her sixth year judging the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, a role she was the first model ever invited to take on. Elsesser described pushing the panel toward conversations about inclusivity across age, gender expression, and body type in addition to those about the designers’ scalability. She likes to pair a practical question with an emotional one.
“I remember my business manager asked me this question about money. Instead of, ‘Let’s get you rich,’ it’s like, ‘What do you want this money to do for you? What world do you want it to create for you?’ And it shifted my perspective about the work that we do,” Elsesser said.
Elsesser also discussed fronting Vogue’s shopping newspaper this season, styling the story herself with her longtime friend and stylist Allie. “I think now we’re kind of phasing out of the quiet-luxury era, which was fine and beautiful and really authentic to some people,” she said. “But I also feel like it sanitized a lot of people’s personal identities, and so I’m happy to represent for the kooky-crazies.”
Her own uniform mixes hard and soft references in equal measure, an instinct she traced back to years of scouring archive sales for pieces that actually fit. Unable to find trousers cut for her body early in her career, she built a signature look around Dickies and Chanel flats, a mix of workwear toughness and balletic polish that still anchors how she dresses today.
Nearly a decade into her runway career, Elsesser said designers have grown more comfortable working with a range of body types, but she’s become tired of the stretch-knit dresses or jackets reflexively offered to curve models.
“I don’t really like the word ‘lazy’ because I don’t think designers are lazy. But I think that there’s a fear. And then it’s kind of like ping-ponging what fashion is comfortable putting us in.”
Her closing philosophy, offered as advice for navigating fashion month and the discourse that comes with it: “The number one central tenet to anything that I try [to] live and encourage is to think critically, not be critical.”
Plus, we take you along for a studio visit with former CVFF finalist Miss Claire Sullivan!
