Malcolm Baron Smith
It's couture, hunny. Malcolm Baron Smith is a fashion stylist based in Los Angeles whose editorial and celebrity work spans Flaunt, Polyester, and Galore. I built his brand identity and portfolio site. Check the tag.
It's couture, hunny. Malcolm Baron Smith is a fashion stylist based in Los Angeles whose editorial and celebrity work spans Flaunt, Polyester, and Galore. I built his brand identity and portfolio site. Check the tag.
Overview
I met Malcolm at Bearded Beagle, a vintage shop in Los Feliz, during my first week in Los Angeles. I was holding a blue watercolor blouse when he tapped my shoulder and said "very Dries Van Noten vibes." That is my favorite designer. In a single sentence he proved his eye to me before I even knew his name. We became close friends quickly, and he became one of my people during my time in the city. Over the years I have watched him channel that same instinct for taste into a real career in fashion styling.
What I have always admired about Malcolm is that his aesthetic lives in the moody, the editorial, the dark. There is a confidence in that. His work gravitates toward shadow and edge in a way that feels completely natural, and it is the same energy that makes everything he touches feel intentional. That sensibility runs through the styling, through the brand, through the site we built together.
The Work
Malcolm sharpened his eye working in vintage retail and began building his styling career across commercial and editorial work simultaneously. He has shot campaigns for brands like Nike while growing his celebrity and editorial client list to include Slayyyter, Holly Madison, Alix Earle, Violet Chachki, Maika Monroe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Empress Of, and Allie X, with work published in Flaunt, Polyester, Galore, Glamcult, and Tax Magazine.
His work on Slayyyter's sophomore record Starfucker stands out as a defining project. The styling is beautiful in the way that only happens when someone truly understands their subject. Every look feels inseparable from the music, and the work they made together has a cohesion that speaks to how deeply Malcolm believed in what she was doing. He had previously assisted on work for Charli XCX, and has a pattern of connecting with artists right before their breakout moments. He also regularly sources pieces from his friend Brittany Hall's label StarCat, putting his community into the work in a way that feels genuine rather than transactional.
Malcolm on set with Slayyyter.
Styling for Slayyyter, Starfucker era.
There is a shot of Alix Earle on a cover wearing nothing but an ice cube on a string that Malcolm made for her on set. That is the kind of stylist he is. The confidence to strip everything back and trust that the idea is enough. More recently, he has been assisting on styling for Hilary Duff as she returns to the spotlight. Across all of his work, what comes through is range. He moves between editorial darkness and something playful and irreverent without losing his point of view.
Alix Earle for Flaunt, styled by Malcolm Baron Smith.
The Brand
Malcolm regularly posts vintage garment tags on his stories, old fonts and worn fabric with absurd brand names printed on them. People look to him for it now. It is one of those quirky things that just embodies who he is, funny and sincere at the same time. That became the starting point for his brand identity. I pitched the idea of designing Malcolm his own label styled like a garment tag, something that felt like it belonged sewn into the collar of a vintage find. We extended the system to include a custom tag for each of his clients, reinforcing the idea that his styling gives people a label that was always meant for them.
Custom garment tag labels designed for Malcolm and his clients.
The visual design was executed by my collaborator Ricky. The result is tactile and irreverent, a brand system rooted in Malcolm's actual personality and the vintage world he came from.
The Site
Ricky and I designed and built the entire site and presented it to Malcolm within a week of our first conversation about it. Years of friendship meant the creative direction was clear from the start. We knew his taste, his references, and what the site needed to communicate. The site is built on Next.js with Tailwind CSS, deployed on Vercel, the same stack I use across my own work because it is fast, flexible, and gets out of the way of the design.
malcolmbaronsmith.com, designed and built in one week.
The portfolio is intentionally minimal. Clean navigation, no competing elements, just the work. The design lets Malcolm's range speak for itself, from moody editorial to bright and unfiltered. Nothing between the viewer and the images.
Malcolm's world lives in that moody space between editorial and personal, and this site is built to match. Reach out to Malcolm for styling, editorial, and campaign work at malcolmbaronsmith.com.
