STYLE NOTES ON: DAKOTA JOHNSON
decoding 'effortless' with everyone's favorite street style crush.
This Style Notes post sat in my drafts for the longest time. I try to find a good mixture of ‘obvious’ style icons to cover with this series, like Jennifer Lawrence or the Moosgaard twins, and ‘less known’ creators, like Janne Aunan and Emma Jang.
Dakota Johnson’s street style has been all over my Pinterest board for years and it felt a bit too obvious to do a Style Notes post on her. But then, I did a lookbook for a lovely client via Indyx this week, and she was looking for something that Dakota Johnson creates with anything she wears: effortlessness. And while I typed in my styling notes for every outfit in the lookbook, I could mentally check off everything Dakota (and her stylist) does.
So, what makes a style crush a style crush? I think the magic formula is almost always the same: effortless style + elegance. If you balance these two, you’re winning - while those two terms can mean a lot of different things in their execution. Now, this sounds very simple when in reality, it’s not. Dakota Johnson embodies the perfect stylish girl-next-door but in an elegant way. And I don’t think she needs more of an introduction.
THREE WORDS & A LOVE FOR CLOTHES
“Classic, minimal, elegant, with just a little bit of fashion for day”, Dakota Johnson’s stylist Kate Young was once quoted by Vogue when asked about her client’s style words. Kate adds: “Words mean very different things to different people”. For evening wear and red carpet looks, “Dakota wants to be a disco ball.”
Effortless style + elegance, told you.
I love learning about a stylist’s relationship with their clients, and I love exploring if someone with great (street) style is dressing well intuitively (and is having fun doing so) or if they depend heavily on their stylists. “She likes clothes. Not all actresses do,” Kate Young says about Dakota. “It’s fun trying on clothes with her; it’s not serious or stressful, and she humors me.”
In this short video below (which is four years old but doesn’t feel dated), Kate Young explains how mood boards can help finding personal style and how she approaches a new client by creating mood boards. She facetimes Dakota Johnson in the video and Dakota says that ‘mood boards are just playlists for physical things’. I love that, and there’s so much you can translate to your own wardrobe.
SILHOUETTE: OVERSIZED
STYLE ELEMENTS: SLIM & SKIN
We’re starting with the elephant in the room for effortless style: oversized clothing. Nothing fitted on its own will help you look effortless. You will look pretty, or ‘hot’ - but you won’t look relaxed in an overall-’fitted’ outfit. The problem is, on the other hand you’ll just look slobby if it’s just oversized on oversized - surprise, you need balance. Kate Young creates this balance on Dakota with a few fitted elements (slim in the Tibi dictionary) and with skin (we’ll come to the v-neck later).
