Irene Albright knows how to turn heads

At seventy-something, Irene Albright has styled everyone from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga. But her path to the top of the fashion hierarchy wasn’t linear. After earning her Master of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, she spent a decade as a fashion editor, stylist and costume designer in New York, racking up an impressive roster of clientele, including the likes of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Victoria’s Secret. In the ’80s, however, the concept of a fashion stylist was still evolving. The cut-throat competition did not yet exist, and it wasn’t uncommon for stylists to lend garments to one another for shoots. When Albright realised she could charge for the favour, she began to see the business potential. In 1990, with a respectable one thousand garments to her name, she opened her first Albright Fashion Library studio in New York. While its early days attracted mainly other industry professionals seeking items for editorials, by 2000, Albright was dressing the cast of American Psycho from her Armani archive.

The entrepreneur wasn’t only interested in amassing A-list clientele, however. Something that Albright kept coming back to during her years spent on set was the amount of waste that came from models wearing items only once. As a result, Albright’s archive was born from a collection of post-shoot garments, which the she bought, ultimately saving them from the fashion closet equivalent of oblivion. The second step in sustainably dressing her clients, then, came in her rental-over-buying system. Decades before companies like Rent the Runway or HURR became commonplace, Albright attracted those seeking something extravagant to wear on special occasions, knowing they could look impeccable at a fraction of the price. It was a win-win situation, and Albright’s ahead- of-the-curve system has now become one of the most coveted fashion collections across the globe. With a seven thousand square foot space in New York and a six thousand square- foot showroom in LA, the Albright Fashion Library exceeds twenty thousand items, which Albright and her daughter-cum-business- partner Marina Albright manage together.

This excerpt was taken from HUNGER Issue 35: F**k it. Stay tuned for the full story.