Just a few years ago, attending New York Fashion Week would have been a pinch-me moment for Devon Lee Carlson. Now, missing it entirely is the real status symbol. The 31-year-old entrepreneur and influencer was turning down show invites this season for good reason: She was coming off two whirlwind weeks in Italy bouncing from the Venice Film Festival (where she supported her actor boyfriend, Duke Nicholson) to Charli XCX and George Daniel’s Sicily wedding. There, Carlson, co-founder of the phone accessories company Wildflower Cases, partied alongside a summit of fellow It Girl guests — Emily Ratajkowski, Alex Consani, Rachel Sennott, Clairo, and Gabbriette, among others — and watched with awe as a few of them raced to get back to Fashion Week in time to walk the runway. “Alex and Emily did it,” she says. “They left their wedding at 5 a.m., drove three hours to the airport in Sicily, and flew straight. It was crazy.”
As for the wedding itself — the musician couple’s second, after an intimate civil ceremony in London earlier in the summer — “it was literally perfect,” Carlson gushes a week later over dinner at East Village hot spot Miss Lily’s. (The Jamaican restaurant is a family favorite: She texts her younger sister, Sydney, to ask which shrimp she loves before ordering an assortment of plates for us to share.)
We’re dining just a few hours after Carlson wraps her NYLON cover shoot. She arrived at the studio location in Queens by herself 15 minutes early, fresh off a red-eye, with two white Rimowa suitcases covered in stickers. She’s feeling a cold coming on, but she’s got places to be — Milan, to attend Demna’s highly anticipated debut at Gucci; Los Angeles, to catch concerts from Tate McRae and Alex G; Paris, to sit front row at Saint Laurent and Valentino and walk the runway in the Coperni show — so she has an on-demand nurse come and administer a midglam IV drip so discreetly I don’t even notice she’s there until she’s heading out and two members of the crew ask for her card. Without taking a break, Carlson spends the next four hours posing and flashing that wide, megawatt smile Charli herself once immortalized in song.
Being an It Girl isn’t easy. Devon Lee Carlson makes it look like it is. Her best stories usually involve her stumbling right into them. Like: How did she meet Charli? “The first time we met was actually through Dua Lipa — she had a birthday party for her boyfriend at the time, and Charli was there, and then we found out our birthdays are one day apart. We were immediately like, ‘Oh, so we’re besties.’” And what about Nicholson? “I met Duke at a Lana Del Rey concert, backstage.” (Nicholson, grandson of Jack, appeared on the album cover of Rey’s Norman F*cking Rockwell.) “A couple months later, I was at a party and he was there, and then we found out we had the same birthday.”
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