Everyone takes notice when Gabriella Karefa-Johnson enters a room; with her infectious exuberance, she brings the party with her wherever she goes. You feel the same energy walking into her four-story home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is filled with an eclectic array of furniture and art mostly found online. “I became very obsessed with Live Auctioneers,” she says. “I didn’t really have the time, or the bandwidth, or the driver’s license, for going to estate sales and picking up furniture.” No need for her to hire an interior decorator — she knows what she is looking for and what she likes. Karefa-Johnson has no time to waste.
The way she has navigated her career in fashion has demonstrated this sense of purpose, and she’s worked hard to stay true to who she is. Most recently, this meant leaving her job at Vogue to throw herself into creating her own role in the industry.
Karefa-Johnson knew she wanted to work in fashion when she arrived in New York to attend Barnard College in 2009. She would have preferred Parsons, but “my mom was very much like, ‘You need to get a liberal-arts education,’ ” she says. But “I spent absolutely no time going to class. I spent all of my time interning and seeing and feeling New York; this is where I am supposed to be.”
She was born in Long Beach, California, one of five siblings. Her twin sister, Christianne (a.k.a. the rapper DoNormaal), now lives on one floor of the house. The death of their urban-planner father when they were infants marked a turning point for the family.
“Basically, from the time of his death, we kind of bounced around,” Karefa-Johnson says. “My childhood was very much about going with the flow, getting by, but it was a beautiful and amazing childhood where I got to experience so much of the world. It’s the reason I can kind of be in any room with any person.”
Her aunt Rosalee, she says, was her fashion inspiration. “She was a fashion model in the ’70s and ’80s, and I got to experience fashion through all the ephemera that she kept from those days.” During her early days in New York, Karefa-Johnson interned at Vogue before being hired on. She went on to become fashion director of Garage magazine. When that folded, she went back to Vogue, styling features with top celebrities and covers (the first Black woman to do so); a highlight was the cover story with Vice-President Kamala Harris.
“I just started getting a little bit more successful and a little bit more comfortable, and I needed a bigger space that would be a sanctuary to come back to from the road because I am always on the road, and I happened to find this bad boy,” she says. Renting “is a bit less of a commitment, and I can make sure that I am working toward this kind of permanent home for myself.”
She mentions how she got the black marble coffee table in the living room on Facebook Marketplace. “And when I wrote the seller, it turned out to be Yumi Nu, an amazing curve model who I found out lived right around the corner, as do Paloma Elsesser, Kimberly Drew, Nikki Ogunnaike, Tina Leung, and many others. Bed-Stuy has given me fabulous neighbors!”
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