When Scarlett White thinks back on her early childhood, there’s one memory in particular she returns to time and time again.
“I remember my mom had a walk-in wardrobe with pink carpets,” White recalls over Zoom, a backdrop of dorm room bookshelves illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen. “She had these fantastic slip dresses that I remember trying on as a little girl, and shelves of shoes that I would fawn over. I always wanted to wear what she wore.”
Of course, this wasn’t just any mom: White is referring to supermodel Karen Elson, the “red flame” from Oldham, who now has three decades at the top of the fashion industry under her belt. And this wasn’t just any closet. Packed to the rafters with rare vintage finds, couture pieces, and runway looks gifted to Elson by some of the world’s most celebrated designers, it was a treasure trove of fashion history.
“Because I’m so deep in the fashion industry, I never wanted to force my style upon Scarlett—or force fashion upon her at all, really,” Elson says, joining the call from her home in Nashville. (That said, she admits that she does remember a phase of dressing White in 1940s-inspired peacoats as a toddler. That ended after Elson took her to the set of a Steven Meisel shoot and the photographer mistook her daughter for a vintage doll.)
To this day, the lure of her mom’s closet often proves too strong for White to resist—and as a result, she’s been “exposed to some very nice things,” Elson says, in something of an understatement. “When she became a teenager, I’d head up into Scarlett’s bedroom and go, ‘Oh that’s where the Galliano dress has gone. That’s where the Jean Paul Gaultier top went.’” Elson smiles. “It was really sweet to see her start to play around with fashion though, and find her own style.”
Does White still raid her mom’s closet? “Oh my God, yeah, all the time,” she says, a little bashfully, as Elson proceeds to call her out for wearing a Marc Jacobs cardigan on TikTok that had recently vanished from her own wardrobe. (“It looked good on you, though,” she admits.) Do White’s friends ever get jealous? “Not jealous, but they do ask to borrow [things] a lot,” White says. “Sometimes I let them, but sometimes it’s too special—I can’t just give out her archival runway clothing.”
