By Drew Taylor
Growing up in Trussville, Chelsi Banks would pore through every page of the latest Vogue magazine she could get her hands on.
Banks had always been into fashion, going back to nights she would sit on the couch with her mom as they watched “Project Runway.” Obsessed with that world, she always thought that maybe she would try to enter the business as a stylist, but it was her love of writing that felt like a better path to that world.
“Styling would never be as fulfilling as writing to me,” Banks said.
Banks has her list of Vogue writers that graced its pages each issue. Firstly, there was Anna Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief who shaped the magazine into what it is today. Then there’s Hannah Jackson, a senior writer who often covered fashion seen in online spaces. Then there was Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a former fashion editor at the magazine who often caused controversy, but always kept things entertaining.
“She broke a lot of barrier at Vogue,” she said. “Being Black and plus-sized, that was revolutionary for the time.”
Now, the 20-year-old can count herself among the countless people featured in Vogue as part of the magazine’s “American Style x Vogue” series, featuring 50 young people from across the country that Vogue editors, as well as series author Biz Sherbert, were defining American style today.
“Sherbert’s 50 American Style x Vogue finalists represent the breadth of Americana, their personal tastes spanning Pacific Northwest grunge, classic Westernwear, and everything in between,” the article stated. As children of the internet, they find inspiration on Pinterest and call back to their favorite shows (Sex and the City, Lizzie McGuire, The X-Files) and movies (Peppermint Soda, Amélie, Clueless). But they also borrow from life, citing their grandmothers and their fathers, Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and Hilma af Klint paintings, and Catholic-school uniforms and frat boys as influences.”
As Vogue was seeking video and essay entries, Banks was sitting in her dorm room at Auburn University, where she is studying apparel merchandising and journalism. She decided she would take a chance.
“I just figured I’d give it a shot and that it would be fun,” she said. “I had no clue I would win.”
Of the 50 people that Sherbert interviewed for the series, Banks and Owen Peters of Minneapolis were the only two she met in person. For the story, Sherbert met Banks at her home in Trussville as Ashley Markle took photos. The final result was a collage of Banks in her comfort zone, her Twiggy-esque, vintage-inspired clothing on full display.
“With the interview, I wanted to come off very educated on fashion,” she said. “I treated it like an opportunity to meet someone in this field that I’d like to be in.”
Banks has already had a lot of practice in the fashion journalism field. In addition to her own Substack and Instagram, Banks is the editor-in-chief of SWATCH, a fashion magazine put out by Auburn students.
“I’ve realized that I like writing about fashion in a way where it relates to people who don’t know much about it,” she said.
Earlier this summer, Banks used that philosophy to inform a piece involving the intersection of her two great loves: fashion and Auburn football.
“It is almost law to dress your best at football games, to do a full face of makeup, buy a new orange and blue matching set that you can only wear to one game— after that, it will just sit in the back of your closet until one of your friends decides to wear it to a game two years later,” she wrote. “Without the fashion, there is no football in the South. The two exist with one another.”
Early on, Banks had a conflicted relationship with being from the South, feeling unfathomably far from the fashion world and things she cared about. However, now she looks at it as another lens to look through the world, especially as a sartorialist.
“I used to hate being from the South, but now I feel like it was really important for me to have those experiences,” she said. “Southern culture has brought a lot to fashion.”
Now in her junior year at AU, Banks is trying to map out what she would like her life to look like after graduation. Ideally, she’d like to move to New York City and work at a fashion magazine, or maybe move to Paris or Copenhagen. Maybe she’ll start her own fashion magazine.
In the meantime, she is truly grateful for the exposure that Vogue gave her and the potential doors it could open for her.
“Being from Trussville, it felt like there were a lot of opportunities that were out of my reach,” she said. “But with this, there feels like there are a lot of possibilities out there.”
Click here to read the Vogue piece.
