Erin Walsh, the stylist behind some of Anne Hathaway’s most photographed looks, has a theory, and it applies to the dinner table as readily as the red carpet: get intentional about one thing, and everything else follows.
Erin Walsh has spent two decades dressing women like Anne Hathaway, Selena Gomez, and Mindy Kaling, a body of work that earned her WWD’s 2026 Red Carpet Style Maker award. Her first book, The Art of Intentional Dressing, arrived in May from HarperOne with a foreword by Hathaway. But ask Walsh about the philosophy underneath the clothes and the conversation moves quickly past the closet.
“When you get intentional about one thing, like style, it starts to affect every single area of your life,” she says. “Your life will expand by being intentional about what you put on your body, what you consume, what you put in your space.” Style, in other words, was never the endpoint. It was the entry.
The crossover led her to The Cocktail Collection, the Diageo line of ready-to-serve cocktails she’s partnered with — a brand collaboration — to extend her thinking from the wardrobe to the gathering. The logic, for Walsh, is seamless. “The idea of entertaining and bringing joy into a moment should not feel stressful, same way you don’t want going into your closet in the morning to feel stressful,” she says. The fix is the same in both arenas: decide how you want to feel, put the pieces in place, then stop fussing.
She borrows a line from her client Sarah Jessica Parker to make the point — “preparation is the antidote to regret.” Set the bar before guests arrive, and the evening runs itself. “You put the parts in place, and then you can go with the flow.”
Photo Credit: The Cocktail Collection
The most useful thing Erin Walsh says about hosting is that she doesn’t separate it from daily life. The dinner party isn’t a different skill set; it’s the same ritual, louder.
“Even when I am hosting my kids every night for dinner, that’s entertaining,” she says. “I like candles every night. We never use paper plates. We set the table. Every evening is a ritual.” When she returned from a recent stretch of travel too tired to cook, the takeout still went on real plates, by candlelight. “Why not make everything as great as it can feel?”
So a gathering, in her framework, is simply that instinct with the dial turned up — not a performance staged for an audience. Walsh draws the same line in hosting that she draws in styling: the moment people start dressing for how others want to see them, the look falls flat. “If you’re trying to show them a version of reality that’s not necessarily true, that’s going to be exhausting,” she says.
Her method translates directly. Walsh tells clients to choose three words for how they want to feel; she applies the same exercise to a room. “For people who come into my home, I want them to feel welcome, relaxed, comfortable and inspired,” she says. Those words become the brief, and everything from the lighting to the glassware answers to them.
Photo Credit: The Cocktail Collection
This summer, Walsh describes her ideal dinner party. It has a South-of-France ease, a gingham tablecloth, and a picnic-basket looseness offset by real crystal. Her palette for the season is green and white, which she notes plays beautifully against the pale citrus of a Lemon Drop Martini in a garden.
She’s a buffet host who still uses place cards, an Etsy obsessive as much as a Serena & Lily one, and a believer in the rule a designer friend gave her years ago: have a cocktail ready the second someone walks through the door. On the bar, she’ll set out The Cocktail Collection’s serves — a Cosmopolitan early, an Espresso Martini later — with a bucket of ice and crystal tumblers, so guests pour their own as the night moves. Her own pick is the Ketel One Lemon Drop Martini over ice, though she admits a weakness for the Negroni.
If there’s a guiding spirit, it’s Martha Stewart, whom Walsh calls the OG, with Athena Calderone as the natural heir. She points to a clip of Stewart entertaining in the 1980s — mismatched glasses, layered textures, nothing precious. “It doesn’t have to match,” Walsh recalls. “It just has to be intentional.”
The line could be the thesis of the whole project. Whether it’s a wardrobe, a table or a Tuesday night with the kids, Walsh isn’t selling polish. She’s selling presence — the decision to treat an ordinary evening as worth dressing for.
Later this summer, Walsh extends the philosophy into new territory with The CREATE Method, an AI-powered platform built on the same framework as the book — Clarity, Ritual, Edit, Align, Truth, Expansion. Through natural conversation, it offers her guidance in the moment, whether a user is getting dressed for a consequential day or simply trying to show up more deliberately. “It’s like me on your shoulder,” she says. The app opens by asking how you feel, then how you want to feel, and walks you through a grounding ritual before suggesting a single thing to wear. For two decades, that guidance lived inside one-on-one appointments. Soon it won’t have to.
To learn more about Erin Walsh, her cocktail collab, and her key to styling her A-list roster, visit www.erinwalsh.com.
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Celebrity Stylist Erin Walsh on Hosting, Style & The Cocktail Collection – Haute Living
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