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.”