KELLY PETERS ST YLE the

Walking around town with Kelly Peters is like walking with a bouquet of balloons. Children’s faces light up, families smile in appreciation, some share compliments, others just stare. Her furry shoes with eyeballs evoke special delight, but you mustn’t miss an entire outfit for a pair of shoes. The magic is in the assortment of bright colors, bold shapes, and textures—the entire bouquet.

Styling, or the strategic building of many individual expressions, is a talent Kelly has honed all her life.

Her first opportunity arrived in the form of Barbie clothes. She enjoyed mixing the outfits, just as she enjoyed skateboarding and launching those Barbies off in her brother’s Tonka trucks. In high school, her mother’s vast, generous wardrobe became her playhouse, when she wasn’t on the soccer field. An armoire of accessories she could raid belonged to the woman who “epitomized a beautiful, strong-yet-fragile, real human being…I remember when she would get dressed, she always would get dressed from head to toe, then brush her teeth,” Kelly chuckles. “And then she’d ask me, ‘Will you take the lint roller and roll it over me and just check and make sure?’ Only then would she leave the house.”

Throughout her life, Kelly and her mother maintained a close bond. Kelly’s mother, an immigrant from Norway, was a forward-thinking woman who nurtured her daughter’s taste for fashion. She was the numbers-savvy parent who saved and tracked the family’s finances—yet she was just as happy to take Kelly shopping for precise items she desired, such as a red suede belt.

One time, Kelly told her mom about a pair of “incredible black patent leather Mary Jane heels.” Her mom’s first question was, “Did you get them?” Kelly responded, “Of course not, they’re like $600.” Ten minutes later, her mom called back and said, “Go get them. I’ll pay half.”

Still, even as everyone in Kelly’s youth and adult life urged her to work in fashion, she lacked language for the work she wanted to do, which wasn’t designing or modeling. The option to be a

“stylist” only emerged decades later—after she’d studied fashion at West Valley College, nannied, worked in a Los Gatos fashion boutique, earned her English degree, and worked her way up from receptionist to executive assistant at a billion dollar furniture company.

When the option did emerge, Kelly had been cultivating her sensibilities for some time. Not only did friends and family pick her brain for advice on what to wear, she was advising style shoots for her company’s product ads. Though her title still read executive assistant, she worked as an in-house liaison of sorts, assisting the freelance stylist her company had hired. Kelly carried a sense of what passed and didn’t pass in a corporate setting. Eventually, “I could do the job with my eyes closed.” During the slower seasons, she explored blogs and put together looks for the stylist—“somewhat bitter that it wasn’t me,” she laughs, yet taking every opportunity to be on set.

When the pandemic hit, her company laid off some executives, and Kelly decided to take the severance package, which also offered a career coach. “Instead of letting life happen to me, I decided to design my life and my path.” In her meditations, she spoke out her wish to work on a high fashion editorial. And then, a friend she’d met on Instagram connected her to a New York stylist who was looking for an assistant. “I said, I’ve already done styling on my own, but to this day, I will absolutely still assist people because it’s an opportunity to learn.” So Kelly reached out and worked on her very first editorial for a software company.

Then, the same stylist invited her to co-style a shoot with her. At Kelly’s enthusiastic acceptance, the stylist began rapidly ordering pieces from brands, sending them to Kelly’s address in the Mission District. “I had 50 to 60 of the most amazing luxury designer brands send me things,” she marvels. “I had Gucci, Dior, Schiaparelli—which is one of my favorite designers. I love anything surreal.”

Then the stylist shared that she would work remotely: Kelly would have to lead this job. They were able to discuss the looks over FaceTime, but, for the first time, Kelly directed each outcome, including the most chaotic step: sending everything back. “Obviously the brand expects everything back relatively quickly, and now I’m responsible for shipping back seventy pieces!” she recounts.

Though she carried a pit in her stomach for days from the stress, baptism by fire gave her the confidence to not only say yes to the next opportunity, but to manifest it. By the time she met her future business partner in their personal styling business, the Front Row, Kelly knew exactly what she was about. “What makes me unique is I re-wear things, and I re-wear things in different ways,” Kelly explains. She teaches her clients how to serve themselves with this skill— how it begins with understanding who they are and who they want to be.

Kelly has known from the start that her expression is limitless. Like the divine timing she believes in, she looks for the beauty in the arrangement: “Perfection doesn’t exist, so let’s celebrate things that are wrong in a good way.” C