On a gleaming morning on Hester Street, where Manhattan Chinatown’s workaday salons and metal shops edge up to Dimes-y designer-ville, Gia Kuan is double-checking spreadsheets. There’s dim sum on the way and a truffle dog napping in the corner; the early August languor betrays little of the tempest soon to descend upon New York—and thus, the professional gatekeepers of her PR shop, Gia Kuan Consulting. In a few weeks, the rows and columns on Kuan’s screen will transfigure into crucial infrastructure for that high-stakes time of the year known as New York Fashion Week.
“I actually don’t feel like this season will be as crazy,” Kuan says, her voice barely audible over the whirring AC as she taps the knuckle-length, NewJeans–themed sheaths of her nail extensions. Call it wishful thinking, or maybe just pregame prayer: For the 36-year-old publicist, Fashion Week in New York endures as the industry Super Bowl, where her stable of homegrown, cool-kid clients can steal the show. The triumph of Telfar, and the fashion darling turned ubiquitous It bag brand’s iconic parties; the now-consistently mobbed Luar runway shows (which, in 2022, overwhelmed even The Shed’s capacity); the big Ambush x Nike x Spotify show that was a bouncer’s nightmare last spring; the Doja Cat concert with Heaven by Marc Jacobs that was pure Bushwickian chaos last fall? Kuan worked them all.
This month, Kuan and her eight-person team will oversee nine NYFW events total, including five runway shows. Over the week, they’ll shape-shift between traditional press managers, party hosts, and when the door calls for it, something akin to a black-op extraction team. Even for those who’ve made it on the vaunted list, attending a “Gia party” is to sign up for spectacle, as fashion writer Emilia Petrarca tells me: “A million people show up, and you have no idea what time it’s going to start, but you wait.” The frenzy’s not not a publicity tactic in itself. “If you are a brand up for the LVMH prize and you have a riot outside of your show, that’s a good thing,” per GQ writer Samuel Hine. Implicit is the consensus that Kuan always pulls it off, at least where essential stakeholders are concerned. As Vogue editor Chioma Nnadi says, recalling an at-capacity Telfar show where Kuan personally plucked her out at the thronged door: “She knew who needed to be in there.”
Also implied: a Gia party delivers. This past March, Heaven’s surprise Deftones concert commanded a 20,000-person waitlist and likely took over your Twitter timeline. Unfortunately for your FOMO, viral-culture critic Rayne Fisher-Quann (invited by GKC to the show after she wound up in a Deftones fan meme) says the night was exactly what it looked like: “You just felt like you were in the absolute coolest room in New York, and that all the coolest people you’d ever seen were there too, and you understood for a second why people kill and die for that feeling.”
The New York PR girl is a vivid but relatively new archetype in recent history: Once the supercharged mass media landscape of the ’90s began transforming our perceptions of power and celebrity, our fascination took hold with the class of professionals working in the ineffable art of public relations. A television trope was born: the fabulous, domineering Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, obviously, but also reality TV flagships like The Hills, which introduced Kelly Cutrone to MTV viewers as Lauren Conrad’s terrifying boss. A 1998 New York magazine cover story by Vanessa Grigoriadis anointed a pack of “Seven Sisters” as the city’s de facto air traffic control for nightlife and social hierarchy. Like Cutrone, the New York cover star Lizzie Grubman went on to have her own, albeit short-lived, reality show. (“Being nice to editors and journalists is the easiest path to coverage, as all the girls have learned,” Grigoriadis wrote. Hmm—hold that thought.)
In the public imagination, these depictions melded and crystallized into the classic PR girl as we know her now: a sometimes brash, sometimes bubbly, often young (and usually white) woman accoutred in various degrees of girlboss-y professionalism—the all-black outfit, the ever-present Blackberry (or these days, the iPhone and iPad). But a funny thing has happened in the last decade or so: The line between PR and whatever it is each of us is doing every day on Instagram, posting and curating and polishing an image toward a monetizable shine—it’s blurring. If the personal is professional for all of us, where does that leave the true masters of the form? This was a predicament that I began fixating on the more I spent time with Kuan, who, in addition to being very good at her day job, happens to have the sort of perfectly curated, studied-without-appearing-studied, envy-inducing social media presence that many actual brands would kill for.
At first glance, Kuan’s public persona easily stands in contrast to the archetypal PR girl. She’s got that quiet voice and a distinctly anti-corporate, kawaii-forward visual aesthetic that manifests in everything from the chunky pink GKC logo stickers pasted to her staff’s cell phones to Kuan’s endlessly kaleidoscopic outfits mixed from streetwear and designer vintage (and the occasional platform crocs). Besides the Comme des Garçons championship ring on her right hand—which she’s worn long enough to alter the shape of her middle finger—the most consistent elements of Kuan’s uniform are the nail extensions, which she keeps up almost year-round—handbag nail glue always at the ready. The nail artist Mei Kawajiri tells me that even Kuan’s hands do great publicity: “Everybody respects her style, you know? So doing Gia’s nails is such an honor.”
At the office, Kuan uses her nails to pinch and zoom the air when she’s talking, like a teacher with 10 tiny blackboard pointers. Observing Kuan clattering on her phone, I realize how much the nails make sense as her ultimate GKC signifier, literally ornamentalizing the work of all that typing, typing, typing. (Phone codependency being perhaps where Kuan most resembles the conventional PR girl: An iPhone screen time report she shows me clocks a daily average of nine hours and 50 minutes—“19% down from last week,” the report says. Per Clara Cornet, who oversees EMEA beauty and fashion partnerships at Meta and travels frequently with Kuan: “I’ve never seen her completely log off.”)
This highly cultivated Gia-ness, where even her pet dog and cat are color-coordinated, has the net effect of making her very, very good at being online. Kuan’s calling card might be live events, but she’s an equivalent master of the Instagram arena. Like many niche personas with tens of thousands of followers, her IG profile is one big approachable-aspirational sweet spot. But the real meat is in Kuan’s encyclopedic Stories, where she regularly posts dozens of times a day, essentially offering a 24/7 slice-of-life stream of everything from her latest exotic work trip to the office lunch spread. Overall, Kuan’s online presence offers a high-low mix that avoids being both boring or annoying, and as a follower, you sense you’re in on a proprietary trend report: You saw that jacket on Kuan before you saw it on Billie Eilish and all of Kuan’s pink ensembles pre-pre-Barbiecore. Or you scrolled through Kuan’s trip to Palm Heights the same week that a Wall Street Journal story about the ritzy Caymans Island resort was published. (“That wasn’t through me!” Kuan promises.)
And then there was the wedding this summer to gallerist Anatoly Kirichenko, rolled out like an early-summer editorial campaign and crammed with touches you’d only find in a game of New York zeitgeist Mad Libs: post–City Hall dinner at the new Dimes Square hot spot Casino; bows, rendered in pink butter for the reception at Golden Unicorn, but also in giant size for her City Hall gown. Of her four wedding-weekend outfits, three came from current or past clients. The other, a Simone Rocha gown, was a not-yet-released Ssense exclusive. The nuptials had their own press cycle and TikTok commentary. It was, after all, a Gia party.
So it’s one thing to cultivate a rep for your killer parties and killer connections, but what may make Kuan’s come-up truly remarkable is how she’s cut this path through the trenches of fashion and online hype machines with the unusual distinction of also being famously…nice? Just as her clients have grown into staples of the moment, Kuan has also fashioned herself into a definitive New York personality—a brand, really—fêted by the media as the city’s favorite fashion publicist whom “everyone wants to be friends with.” Among a rarefied list of 50 downtowners published and celebrated with a party last winter (where I first met Kuan in person), Air Mail boiled down her primary achievement as “being incredibly well liked.”
Of course, there are obvious incentives for anyone worth their Instagram handle to flatter Kuan and the “omnipresent, omnipotent vapor” she embodies within the industry, as Magasin‘s Laura Reilly told me. Still, throughout conversations with more than two dozen people in Kuan’s personal and professional orbit conducted for this profile, it became borderline ludicrous how readily everyone singled out this legendary niceness. Part of it has to do with what Kuan isn’t. The work of public relations is that of a constantly shifting power dynamic: You might be the sacred keeper of access one minute, then wind up as an unwelcome inbox spammer next. As several writers each noted to me with relief, Kuan manages to be neither annoying nor pretentious. “A certain type of journalist loves to complain about publicists on Twitter…one can sense a general lack of esteem for the industry,” fellow downtown publicist Kaitlin Phillips observes to me. “This makes it easier to be a star publicist, I think.”
According to colleagues and collaborators, Kuan is the type of “PR,” as industry parlance goes, who talks to you like a friend—about fashion, naturally, but also reality dating shows, the vacation you posted on Instagram weeks ago, and just about anything except (perhaps crucially) gossip. “She doesn’t speak negatively of other people,” the designer and CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist Kim Shui tells me. “That’s very, very important.” There’s the impression that the world of GKC is one big inclusive creative community; clients like Heaven designer Ava Nirui tell me she originally connected to Kuan through shared friends. Lu’u Dan founder Hung La says he thinks of Kuan as family: “She’s just good people.” La adds, “When I came up, it was all about exclusivity. Now it’s all about inclusivity, and I think Gia embodies that.”
Here’s where I landed after a year of knowing Kuan professionally and the past month spent trying to understand her It factor: niceness, in the era of heavily mediated notions of authenticity, is its own memorable fluorescence. But the real core of Kuan’s persona is something even more enviable (and much harder to fake): a composure that is both the foil to her success and her reputation. This is what members of Kuan’s inner circles point to when they’re asked about the GKC secret sauce with descriptors like “sphinx,” “neutralizer,” “poker face,” and “nerves of steel.” (“If I wasn’t working for her, I don’t really think I would want to work in fashion,” says Fiona Luo, who was Kuan’s first GKC hire.)
Journalist Robert Cordero remembers observing Kuan outside of the melee of Luar’s fall-winter 2023 show in February in Greenpoint. “People were trying to get in, and for a minute there, when you just feel bodies pushing against you, it feels a little bit dangerous!” he says. “It’s kind of fight or flight! But in that moment, I see her. She was just so calm. You know when you’re taking a yoga class and you lock eyes with your teacher? That’s the feeling I had.”
Khaite communications director Isabella Isbiroglu earnestly tells me she’d never actually seen Kuan anxious in the nearly four years they were roommates. Kirichenko swears even he can’t always tell if his wife is feeling frazzled. “She’s so deadpan,” he says. “I guess maybe she’s seen it all in another life or something. I have no idea.”
Growing up, Kuan was a perpetual newcomer. She was born in Taipei to a father who worked in politics and a mother in shipping logistics; the family moved to the Dominican Republic, where her father worked at the Taiwanese embassy, when Kuan was five. She spent three years in Santo Domingo, which is where she learned her American-inflected English before moving back to Taiwan. Before Kuan could finish elementary school, her parents sent her by herself to suburban New Zealand, where she lived with relatives for a year before her parents joined her.
As an enterprising only child, Kuan remembers entertaining herself with a lot of manga, scrapbooks, and imaginary conversations with her Barbies. Over noodles at Dr. Clark, where she’s dressed in a striped Marimekko shirt and thrifted Prada shorts, Kuan recounts the story of her first business: To drum up pocket money for the first volume of Sailor Moon, Kuan took her old comics and household knickknacks to school. At lunchtime she laid her wares out for sale on a tablecloth. “It started a trend!” Kuan laughs. “They had to stop other kids from doing that—like, you can’t be doing trade in third grade.” By 13, she’d had a paper route and a short stint as a milk delivery girl, which she remembers was “a little dangerous because you’re grabbing onto the back of the truck.”
High school offered further opportunities for overachievement. Kuan was the orchestra’s lead flutist and the assistant conductor, as well as house culture captain (“and the captain of the French club that two people were in,” she adds. “We just ate baguettes and watched French movies all day.”). She was a good student, but teenage Kuan also felt stifled by the more traditional values of suburban Auckland’s immigrant Taiwanese community, where her penchant for streaking her hair and dressing like the Spice Girls got a couple of other judgier moms on her case. “I feel like they thought I was a bit of a floozy,” she says. “But that definitely put a bit of a fire under my ass. I was like, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong.’” She skipped college campus visits to pierce her tongue and drove into the city with friends to hang around house parties and pool halls. Staying in the burbs was out of the question.
At the University of Melbourne, Kuan soon switched from studying law to communications. She got jobs in nightlife, moving up the ranks from promoter to bottle girl to door girl until she became the girl who hired everyone else (and made sure everyone looked great in photos). “Looking back, that’s exactly what I do now!” Kuan recalls.
In 2010, Kuan picked up and moved to New York, where she had no family or connections outside of a vague memory of visiting the city once as a kid. “I was definitely romanticizing it,” she explains. “Not so much the American dream, but the idea of there being a space for someone like me to just start from scratch and erase all of these preconceived notions, like what those angry aunties had.” She enrolled in a fashion marketing course at Parsons, which plunged her into internships at PR Consulting and Tom Ford, and then a job at Comme des Garçons, and she found a place on Craigslist in the East Village. Isbiroglu, the roommate, recalls those intern days spent in strict devotion to sample sales and a sense of occasion: hosting Thanksgiving dinner in July, trying the American delicacy of Funfetti cake for the first time.
Restaurateur and author Eddie Huang remembers meeting Kuan as a student, back when she hung out at the original Baohaus. “I actually had no idea what Gia did for work,” he writes in an email. “Then one night, I went to this Purple magazine party with Brian Procell. We had an extra homie with us, and we were going to have to finesse the door, but the door turned out to be Gia. And I was like, Thank God. Then I started seeing Gia running all the good parties.”
During the five years Kuan spent at Comme des Garçons, two major developments happened. The first was meeting Kirichenko: He was an intern at Adam Kimmel at the time, and the pair first crossed paths over a garment-bag drop-off on a rainy night. (“I remember her being really nice and welcoming, like not a mean fashion person,” Kirichenko says of his first impression.) The second was the New York launch of Dover Street Market—the multibrand retailer adjacent to Rei Kawakubo’s Garçons-verse—where Kuan says she found her calling: working with emerging labels like Molly Goddard and Jacquemus. Until then she’d been skeptical about a career in PR; a former boss had recommended social media as a more suitable field for the young introvert. But at Dover Street, Kuan realized she could be someone who helped other scrappy up-and-comers. Artist and DSM visual merchandiser Eri Wakiyama, who befriended Kuan during this time, remembers they were often close in age to these emerging designers: “Maybe that made her want to help these brands more, [because she] could feel their urge to create new things.”
By then, Kuan had become acquainted with PR veteran Nadine Johnson, whom she approached for a job. “I wasn’t sure at the beginning, to tell you the truth,” says Johnson, “There was so much fashion about Gia! But she was very convincing.” Over the next three years, Kuan managed arts and culture clients for Johnson’s boutique agency while also spending nights and weekends as a hobby publicist for her growing network of friends and mutuals—including, starting in 2017, a then CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund nominee named Telfar Clemens. (In discussing the success of Telfar, Kuan is quick to point out that she was simply “the messenger” for the designer’s most creative projects, from Telfar TV to the Bag Security Program; she notes that the “Bushwick Birkin” descriptor was originally coined by someone on Twitter.)
Two years after Gia Kuan Consulting officially opened shop in Chinatown, Clemens was an award-winning, all-American success story on the Time 100 Next list. Meanwhile, Kuan became the apparent go-to fairy godmother for anyone ambitious—and interesting—enough to be next. These days, Kuan may also represent brands as far-ranging as fashion labels like Jordan Brand and the astrology app Co-Star, but she’ll still only take on clients who pass the personal vibe check. As Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian puts it, “It means something if Gia represents you.”
Somewhere along the way between honing her persona and her style of PR—and anointing plenty of the industry’s breakout stars—Kuan became a status symbol herself.
Here, then, the crucial question arises. Neither Kuan, nor others in her generation of increasingly visible fellow indie publicists, are the first to apply advantageous business (and social media) savvy to matters of their own image. But Kuan proves especially adept at operating in the now familiar mode of parasocial internet personality: someone you feel like you know even if you don’t—a character whom you like and therefore whose taste you trust. Does this mean Kuan is actually more an influencer than a publicist?
“I’m from the old guard, where we are the power behind the client, and we should never be seen or heard or talked about,” Johnson, Kuan’s former boss, tells me when I pose this question. But that’s the old system, she adds. Kuan is emblematic of the new one. As another indie fashion publicist, Nate Hinton, puts it, “That expression of hers just happens to be what looks like liberation in an industry where you had to be white, and you had to wear all black. That’s no longer the case. She can dress up in her designers, and she can do the guest list and pitch a story. There are some publicists who are just the expression.”
To her peers, the question feels redundant. “Is the modern PR not an influencer—someone to shape the news cycle and shape the ways we think and make us want to live the ways that they want?” asks actor, editor, and longtime Kuan friend Blake Abbie. Abbie, who starred in the Netflix reality show Bling Empire: New York earlier this year, tells me he’d actually tried to get Kuan to make more than a tiny cameo on the show, to no avail. “She doesn’t want that kind of attention,” he assures me. “She wants a nice, quiet life with her dogs and her husband and tons of clothes and amazing nails.”
At the end of August, I pose the matter to Kuan during a visit to her Gramercy Park apartment, where we lounge on her ivory Mario Bellini sofa, surrounded by the paintings, custom furniture, and other well-appointed trappings reflective of both the trained eye and creative network Kuan has grown in the past decade of making New York home (Kuan, still jet-lagged from a two-week trip to Australia, is wearing a sweatsuit with shoulder cutouts, from Telfar). What does she make of the construction—and connotation—of her personal brand?
“I do feel lucky that there’s been that attention,” Kuan says, leaning on an elbow. She acknowledges the blurring line between influence wielded both behind the scenes and out front, though in her mind, the Instagramming is “more of a way of documentation, not as a way of marketing,” adding, “If I don’t post it, it’s like it didn’t happen for me.” The press has always come calling on its own: She tells me she’s never actually pitched herself.
“At the end of the day,” Kuan says, sliding into a royal we that brings us back to the GKC talking points. “We understand people and subculture. That’s what makes us good at what we do.” The matter of influence interests her only insofar as it moves the needle on the actual clothes and stories and characters we see. “How different would fashion be if these brands weren’t uplifted in the past five, six years? Who was going to believe in them first?”
Kuan thinks back to the height of the pandemic, when the state of the Gia party looked particularly bleak. She’d spent much of the time doing virtual class visits at various universities, mentoring students and walking them through her work. It reminded her how much she loves working with young people, Kuan says with the kind of collegial deference of a professional recognizing who the real arbiters of cool ever truly are. “I was just thinking about, you know, if I was able to do things differently, then maybe they can be the next ones to change things,” Kuan says. “And things don’t have to be so gate-kept all the time.”
