How I landed the job: From NY stylist to Visual Director for Tabor and Capitol

Scott Newkirk

Scott Newkirk is an associate buyer for Tabor and visual director for Tabor and Capitol, and his path to Charlotte couldn’t be more roundabout. Although he’s worked with some of the most iconic fashion brands, a quick Google search also reveals that he’s known for building the coolest house in the woods, like, ever:

Here’s his path to CLT, as told by Scott, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

I grew up near Jackson, Miss., and college and school in general didn’t sit well with me.

I decided to strike out on my own at 19 and got lucky really. Without even having a very serious interest in fashion at that point outside of liking clothes, I got a sales job in a men’s clothing store that was new in Jackson.

I quickly started doing all their interior display and windows and soon I was like, hey, I think I can do this. I eventually left the sales position and worked freelance for two other stores before moving to New York.

I started working at Barneys in 1985, I had just turned 25. My roommate at the time was the director of a Giorgio Armani boutique, and within 6 months I was hustling from Barneys downtown, uptown to Armani to do windows for them as a freelance gig. I continued working with Armani as a a freelancer for 7 years. Eventually I left Barneys and started freelancing full time.

I started working as an assistant to a fashion stylist and I worked with him for 3 years.

Our main client was The New York Times Magazine (now T Magazine) doing men’s and women’s fashion and home design of the weekend magazine, which was amazing.

I was pretty naïve and didn’t realize how important that was – the level of work and photography and all that.

So it’s funny, the people from Mississippi that lived in NY at the time, we all knew each other and helped each other out. My friend Sidney Mashburn who now has a very successful career doing men’s clothing, he was living in New York and working as a designer at J.Crew. And they became my first client as a stylist.

I was doing interior merchandising and display for their very first retail store in Seaport and started on the catalog, working on that three years on and off. They started branching out, about five retail stores for J.Crew when they branched out of NY.

I was working in LA, Atlanta, Chicago, and continued working as a fashion stylist for 26 years.

I worked with Calvin Klein from ’92 to ’95 doing all their fashion shows.

John Varvatos was the designer for Calvin Klein then he branched out; he had a few years working outside of Calvin and then he called me. I worked with for him for 5-6 years and during that time I got connected with COACH.

I worked with COACH as their main stylist for advertising and 14 years I worked there, through their whole resurgence that started in 2000s. I started right when Reed Krakoff was the creative director and we had a great working relationship.

It was a very interesting client because as a freelance person, you really aren’t connected to a lot. It’s a job here and there… It’s fun, it’s loose, you have free time, you work hard when you work and then you’ve got time to have your own life. So it was great to be a part of COACH where you were really an active part of the vision of what a brand could be. It had been kind of tired and was about to go through its revival.

Reed left in 2012 or 2013 and around that time I was thinking there would be something I could do besides this. I tooled around with a small furniture collection that I launched at the end of 2012 and got great press with it.

New York is like a drug, and it’s extremely hard to walk away from it.

My whole adult life and all my friends were there and are there, now. So all different events happened toward the end of 2012 and my father wasn’t doing well, my frustration with my work was happening, and I saw a break in work for about 2 months.

I thought, listen to the universe and get out of town. I decided to go home. I could reconnect with my parents, spend time with my dad, and use the time to rid myself of the NY addiction and figure it out.

So I spent two years in Mississippi which was difficult and important. I realized I’d been living in a very privileged bubble of the world. In this lifestyle as a fashion stylist, to be honest, I never felt like I worked that hard. It all very came easily. I worked two weeks per month, had three days here, a week here – it was very luxurious and I got paid a lot of money.

I’d been taking a lot of things for granted and I had to come to terms with that. I didn’t want to go back but I didn’t have a plan. Should I start my own business? But with what?

A friend in New Orleans said, come down here. Perfect. I went down and signed up with an agency that just opened that represented stylists. I was doing a little work in NY too but just prior I got an email from Perry [Poole]. I had not seen Perry in 20 years but we had a mutual friend, someone I met the first few years in New York.

He told me about [Laura Vinroot Poole’s store, Capitol] and asked me to come and work with them on the next level. It with difficult with me being remote and Laura traveling a lot. Over time Perry started talking about what would be next, and about Tabor. I was working on designing the store with them and getting to know Charlotte. It really started to click.

After such a long freelance career, now I want to be a part of something bigger.

A photo posted by Tabor (@taborclt) on

I became the visual director for both of the stores, and I’ve always had a desire to do interior design. With Perry being an architect, it was the perfect opportunity for us to work together in the design aspect but also get the men’s store (Tabor) off the ground.

It is an extremely unique job working on interior design with Perry, working on the brand new men’s store, and the women’s store going on 20 years now. As of last week I started working with Perry on buying for Tabor, something I’m incredibly excited about.

One of the things that has been always easy for me was communicating with people.

Working with these clients [throughout my career] has been about body language, level of attention, and understanding that the most important thing is really not you but the client and what their needs are.

I can give them their point of view without letting egos get involved. You have to separate the personal from the professional, and you can’t take offense if someone doesn’t like something. That’s where the talent is – when you can perceive what they need just from words and deliver on that visually.

All photos courtesy of Scott Newkirk.

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A career in fashion isn’t just for New Yorkers. Tabor and Capitol are both hiring now.