Want to Know Who Billie Eilish Is Wearing? Ask This 21-Year-Old Thrift Store Employee
In the mid-2010s, I saw a photo of Taylor Swift stepping out of her TriBeCa apartment building in a navy sweater with “New York” printed on the chest. I recognized the sweater immediately; it was from Brandy Melville. I pictured Swift in the store browsing the racks that I too had thumbed, and I felt a previously unfathomable kinship. We shopped at the same places. Before, I hadn’t been sure we existed in the same universe.
In that moment, I got lucky. But most of the time, style hunting is a systematic process. If you see someone online who’s wearing something you like, you might spend hours trying to trace the garment with nothing to go on but a blurry Instagram story or a mirror selfie. Celebrity style hunters take this a step further, combing red-carpet stills and paparazzi photos, relying on a mixture of intuition and expertise. Style accounts for mega-stars like Taylor Swift (@taylorswiftstyled) and Kendall Jenner (@kendalljennerscloset) have been around since the early 2010s. Over time, these types of accounts have multiplied as social media has enabled us to form obsessive parasocial relationships with celebrities. We can see what they wear at the grocery store, in the car, and on vacation. We can feel connected to them by knowing every last detail of what they choose to put on their bodies and where they choose to shop.
These days, there are Instagram pages dedicated to musicians, actors, models — even influencers. They post outfit photos next to screenshots of product listings on online stores. Their captions are filled with labels, styles, and price tags. We spoke to four people who run celebrity style accounts: Carter Rega, a 26-year-old who follows the influencer Devon Lee Carlson (@styleofdevonlee) and holds a corporate job outside of fashion; Alina Kraieva, a 21-year-old thrift store employee, who tracks what Billie Eilish wears (@eilishoutfits); 22-year-old Flordielyn Coloma, who runs @laufeystyle and studies fashion design; and the 22-year-old administrator of the Chappell Roan-dedicated @chappellroanstyle, who is a student and asked to remain anonymous. They told us about their processes, their methods, and why they’re so dedicated to the wardrobes of their faves.
The woman behind @chappellroanstyle has long used photos of celebrities as references in her own drawings, taking special care to capture their outfits. She discovered Chappell Roan in 2023 and felt connected to her because they both had big curly hair, and because she loved Roan’s custom rhinestone outfits. Roan’s career hadn’t yet blown up, and there was no style page dedicated to her. The woman behind the account had no fashion background, but she saw an opening to try something new.
For two or three months, she posted almost every day. At first the account grew slowly, reaching about 200 followers in the first month. Roan followed her in December 2023, and by the time she played Coachella in April 2024, the account had hit 5,000 followers. Thanks to a string of festival appearances by Roan, the account grew rapidly; it now has about 29,000 followers, some of whom have been liking and commenting since the very beginning.
The process of outfit identification is meticulous. The @chappellroanstyle admin begins by selecting a photo from a red carpet, a concert, a shoot, or Roan’s own page. Then she dissects the outfit and attempts to identify each component. If Roan doesn’t tag a brand on Instagram, she’ll use reverse Google image search, or type descriptors into the search bar, to find a specific garment. She stores thousands of close-up screenshots, Notes app notes, and search queries on her phone and computer. AI, which she sees as lazy, is off limits: “It doesn’t align with my values and feels like an insult to the people who spend so much time working on these costumes.”
To make sure that she has the right piece, she pays attention to its hem, its stitching, and where the fabric is cut or cropped. After years on the job, she can recognize brands from details as minute as a stitching pattern. For a typical ID, the process takes a couple hours. A custom look can take up to ten. If Roan has worn something from a certain brand before, the match is easier to find. “You feel like you’re losing your mind,” the admin says, “but it’s very rewarding once you know you’ve got it.”
“I think my brain changed a little bit,” she adds. “I’ll look at something and think, ‘Oh, I know who made that, I know where that came from.’ I’ve developed another sense.”
All four of the women who run these accounts know which designers their subjects gravitate toward. When Carter Rega sees Devon Lee Carlson in a new tank top, she cross references Frankie's Bikinis and Gimaguas. Her Holy Grail tool is Google reverse image search, where she can input a screenshot, type in a keyword or two, and often get an exact match. Rega is also a member of a style-account group chat on Instagram where she can solicit product information from well-trained eyes who are familiar with brands outside of the typical Carlson rotation.
Because Rega works a full-time job, she uses her downtime after work or on weekends to search for pieces. She saves all of Carlson’s photos in an chronologically ordered album and maintains a Pinterest board with all of the product images for easy downloading. The entire process can be done on her phone, which makes IDing both flexible and convenient. One outfit usually takes about 30 minutes to complete.
However, if an item is especially difficult to find, she can go straight to the source. “I do have a relationship with Devon,” Rega says. “If I’m totally stumped on something, I can ping her, and she’s typically super responsive and great. I try not to bother her too much, obviously. But I’m able to be like, ‘Hey, everyone wants to know where this dress is from. Is it vintage?’ When Devon confirms that it’s from a random thrift store and not traceable on the internet, it feels like I’m not crazy.”
Sometimes, the source will come to you. Once, Alina Kraieva was trying to ID a black hoodie that Billie Eilish wore in her 2021 documentary The World’s a Little Blurry. She recognized an embroidery detail and traced it to a specific brand, who confirmed via DM that it was from their collection. Still unsure, she double checked with Eilish’s stylist, who pointed her to a different hoodie. Trusting the official source, Kraieva posted the picture with the stylist's (incorrect) correction, only for the star herself to comment that her look wasn’t styled by anyone. “She just threw on whatever she had,” Kraieva says. “It was actually the hoodie that I found first.” Her sharp eye had been right all along.
The people behind these accounts offer their audiences the satisfaction of discovery without the legwork. Of the four account owners I spoke to, only Kraieva makes money from affiliate links. Laufey’s team asked Flordielyn Coloma to create a style guide surrounding the new album to inspire people’s tour outfits, but they didn’t pay her for it. (She says she makes the guides out of love for fashion and for Laufey.) The @chappellroanstyle admin says she wants to avoid the stress of promoting products or getting money involved, but Rega wishes there were more opportunities to monetize.
When asked why she thinks people follow her account, Carter has a straightforward reply. “Devon has a weird cult following. People are curious about what she’s wearing, how much it costs. A big factor is, ‘Could I buy this? Could I wear what she has?’” The @chappellroanstyle admin imagines her work as source material for artists — a point of reference for fans to make their own costumes or express their creativity with more precise real-world detail.
About her future plans, @chappellroanstyle’s admin says, “I’m going to keep doing this until I can’t anymore. It’s something I’m so passionate about. I will never take it for granted.” There are reciprocal effects, too, Coloma says: “When I started this account, I was studying architectural technology. But then I dropped out and moved into fashion design. It changed how I see fashion and how I wear my clothes.”
Of all the ways to engage with celebrity, running a style account might be one of the most intimate. You learn what silhouettes they prefer, how often they change their phone case (for Carlson, who runs Wildflower Cases with her sister, it’s a lot), what they wear on days at home. You see how, over the course of multiple years, their style evolves and morphs — a reflection of age, career, location, and taste. Eilish, for instance, “was known for her baggy streetwear,” Kraieva says, “but during her Happier Than Ever era, her vintage, soft, feminine style reflected a more mature and self-assured version of herself.”
“Billie has always been a very visual artist,” Kraieva adds. “She’s honest in her art, and it shows through her style.”
