The Who What Wear Podcast: Denim Expert Benjamin Talley Smith on Making Best-Selling Khaite and Reformation Jeans, Plus the Styles to Shop this Summer

The annual Nordstrom Anniversary Sale is live, and to celebrate, Who What Wear Shopping Director Bobby Schuessler is talking to one of the great curatorial minds behind the sale—Nordstrom Associate Fashion Director Linda Cui Zhang. In this episode, Zhang reveals the product selection process for the sale, the trends her team prioritized, and the new brands she was excited to bring into the fold this year. Plus, she shares the most covetable items to shop before they sell out, her favorite giftable beauty bundles, and the key pieces to prioritize if you’re looking to elevate or refresh your wardrobe but don’t know where to start (think seasonless Frye riding boots and versatile Vince short-sleeve wool tees). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sarah Davis is the founder and president of the luxury resale company Fashionphile. Davis was a self-proclaimed “debate nerd” during her teens and had early aspirations of becoming a lawyer. After earning her undergrad, she quickly enrolled in law school at the University of Maryland. Growing up, Davis had become accustomed to taking odd jobs to pay for things like clothing, so she applied that same mentality to putting herself through school. To make money, she cut boys’ hair in the dorms and even started a peer-to-peer used lawbook platform with her brother-in-law called lawswap.com. She also began selling her belongings on eBay for extra cash, and that’s when she realized that there was a largely untapped market for luxury resale. In 1999, she created a storefront on eBay called Fashionphile, focused on reselling luxury handbags, and was soon able to make enough money to pay off her student loans. Although Davis did graduate from law school and even pass the bar, she had found her true passion in growing her resale business and decided to opt out of pursuing a law career. She ran Fashionphile on eBay for the first several years of the business before bringing her brother-in-law into the fold and legitimizing the brand with its own website. Today, over 25 years later, Fashionphile is the largest platform in the country for buying and selling pre-owned, ultra-luxury accessories. The brand now has headquarters in San Diego and New York City, an office in Tokyo, and retail locations all across the country.

In this episode, Senior Fashion Editor Eliza Huber—Who What Wear’s resident expert on the intersection of sports and fashion—is sitting down with two stylists behind some of the best tunnel fashion we’ve seen in recent months. Brittany Hampton is a seasoned athlete stylist whose client roster includes some of the buzziest women in basketball: Paige Bueckers, Sabrina Ionescu, Cameron Brink, Evan Mobley, and Nika Mühl. She’s also the Golden State Valkyries’ fashion strategist. Manny Jay began his styling career working with musicians like Trippie Redd and Tink, and more recently manifested his way into the sports arena through his work with WNBA tunnel ’fit veteran Skylar Diggins-Smith. Today, Hampton and Jay discuss the WNBA’s unprecedented growth over the last year and how that heightened visibility impacts their clients’ relationships with fashion. They get into the ways that athlete fashion extends beyond aesthetics, influencing fan accessibility, marketing avenues for players, and even their on-court performance. Check out Eliza’s Go Sports content here!

Denise Woodard is the founder and CEO of Partake, an allergy-friendly food company. Woodard started her career in pound-the-pavement sales roles at Philip Morris and FedEx, gaining robust experience in winning business by providing genuine solutions to her clients. She then spent the majority of her early career at the Coca-Cola Company, starting in sales and then finding her niche working on the emerging brands that were better aligned with her values, like Honest Tea and Health-Ade. After rising through the ranks and becoming the director of national sales for Coca-Cola’s Venturing and Emerging Brands (VEB), Woodard was proud of the career she had built for herself and didn’t envision she’d ever leave her job. But after having her daughter, Vivienne, and finding out her child suffered from food allergies, she started to realize just how stark the allergy-friendly food landscape was. She couldn’t find any options that were nutritious and delicious, and after some nudging from her nanny, Woodard decided to do something about it. She promptly put together a new business pitch for an allergy-friendly snack brand, entered a pitch competition, and won. She spent the next year building Partake while working her day job before leaping into it full-time. Since then, Woodard has become the first Black woman to raise over $1 million for a packaged food company, and Partake Foods can now be found in over 18,000 retailers, including Target and Whole Foods.

Ron Robinson is the founder of BeautyStat and the cosmetic chemist behind Hailey Bieber’s skincare line, Rhode. Robinson began his career at Clinique in the ’90s and, over the past two decades, has worked on products for industry giants like Revlon, Avon, L’Oréal, and Lancôme. He launched BeautyStat as an educational platform for beauty enthusiasts in 2009 but ultimately moved into developing his own product line in 2019 with the launch of his groundbreaking, ultra-potent vitamin C formulation. Celebs took notice, and Hailey Bieber quickly reached out to bring him on as a partner in what would become Rhode. In this episode, Robinson chats with Who What Wear Beauty Director Erin Jahns about the science behind successful products and which ingredients are worth the hype.