Stylist and personal shopper Alison Beshai shares her wardrobe must-haves for the new year, and talks about how persistence pays off.
Alison Beshai knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go after it. Eager to score a job in styling, the Chantilly native began her career the old-fashioned way—persistence and hard work—taking countless unpaid jobs to build a portfolio. “I had a website and business cards before I had a paying client,” she says. At 19, she received her first paid gig as a fashion contributor for Richmond magazine while attending VCU, and has since worked with brands like Nike and Numari, before starting her own company Alison Beshai Styling three years ago.
At 25, she still possesses that go-getter attitude going above and beyond by creating a fully styled lookbook for each client that she shops for, a concept she might have picked up from her time working as a stylist for HGTV’s “Power Brokers” when she remotely dressed the host (Mike Aubrey) by shopping and putting together a lookbook for someone to reproduce on set. Now, her client lookbooks take the guesswork out of how to wear the new pieces. “One client says that every morning when she wakes up she opens the lookbook, picks a picture and then she gets dressed. She went from taking an hour to get ready to 20 minutes,” she says.
Despite finding success with television and editorial styling, Beshai states that she is most proud of how much her 25 recurring personal styling clients have grown and evolved fashion-wise within the last couple of years and aims to continue to shake up the D.C. fashion scene by bringing personal styling services into unexpected places. “Hotels, shopping malls, it could be anything,” she says. –Angela Bobo
(January 2015)