Vanessa Traina

Vanessa Traina is an American stylist, editor, creative consultant and retail director born in San Francisco on 18 December 1984. She entered fashion as a teenager and developed experience through editorial and styling work, including time around Vogue Paris, stylist Marie-Amélie Sauvé and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her career has since moved across editorial image-making, brand consultancy, merchandising and retail direction.

In 2013 Traina became executive creative director of Assembled Brands and its lifestyle retailer The Line. The role placed her at the centre of a portfolio model that combined fashion, objects and domestic design through The Apartment by The Line. She shaped selection, visual context and brand positioning across the retail concept while maintaining independent styling work. Traina remained in the Assembled Brands and The Line structure through 2019.

Traina was also part of Khaite’s early institutional network. She reconnected Catherine Holstein with Assembled Brands as the label was being developed and helped establish the initial retail context through The Line. Her contribution centred on curation, positioning and later recurring styling. Holstein remained responsible for Khaite’s clothing design.

As an independent stylist and consultant, Traina has worked across fashion houses, editorial publications and commercial projects. Khaite remains one of her durable collaborations, with documented styling credits spanning the label’s early image language, the Fall 2021 film period, the Fall 2023 store runway, Spring 2026 and Resort 2027. Her practice combines the precision of editorial styling with the broader decisions of brand direction and merchandising.

Traina works through selection and reduction. Her styling favours clear silhouettes, controlled layering and a limited number of decisive accessories, allowing proportion and material to remain legible in the final image. This restraint gives her work a strong editorial structure even when the clothing itself moves through dense texture, evening glamour or exaggerated volume.

Her experience with The Line expanded that approach beyond the dressed figure. Clothing, furniture, beauty, books and objects were edited into a domestic environment where each item gained meaning through proximity and use. The same curatorial discipline informs her consultancy work, linking product selection with presentation, merchandising and brand position.

At Khaite, Traina’s role is strongest in the conversion of Holstein’s collection into a complete visual proposition. Styling can sharpen the label’s movement from denim and knitwear into formal tailoring, eveningwear and accessories without altering the source of the designs. Her repeated work with photographers, casting teams and beauty collaborators has helped maintain continuity across lookbooks, runway imagery and film.

Traina’s wider practice depends on the ability to move from individual garments to the conditions around them. A look is treated as part of an image, a product can sit within a retail environment, and a brand identity can be adjusted through editing without being redesigned from first principles. This gives her work a distinctive position across styling, curation and creative consultancy.