Devon Lee Carlson Is For The Girls

Just a few years ago, attending New York Fashion Week would have been a pinch-me moment for Devon Lee Carlson. Now, missing it entirely is the real status symbol. The 31-year-old entrepreneur and influencer was turning down show invites this season for good reason: She was coming off two whirlwind weeks in Italy bouncing from the Venice Film Festival (where she supported her actor boyfriend, Duke Nicholson) to Charli XCX and George Daniel’s Sicily wedding. There, Carlson, co-founder of the phone accessories company Wildflower Cases, partied alongside a summit of fellow It Girl guests — Emily Ratajkowski, Alex Consani, Rachel Sennott, Clairo, and Gabbriette, among others — and watched with awe as a few of them raced to get back to Fashion Week in time to walk the runway. “Alex and Emily did it,” she says. “They left their wedding at 5 a.m., drove three hours to the airport in Sicily, and flew straight. It was crazy.”

As for the wedding itself — the musician couple’s second, after an intimate civil ceremony in London earlier in the summer — “it was literally perfect,” Carlson gushes a week later over dinner at East Village hot spot Miss Lily’s. (The Jamaican restaurant is a family favorite: She texts her younger sister, Sydney, to ask which shrimp she loves before ordering an assortment of plates for us to share.)

We’re dining just a few hours after Carlson wraps her NYLON cover shoot. She arrived at the studio location in Queens by herself 15 minutes early, fresh off a red-eye, with two white Rimowa suitcases covered in stickers. She’s feeling a cold coming on, but she’s got places to be — Milan, to attend Demna’s highly anticipated debut at Gucci; Los Angeles, to catch concerts from Tate McRae and Alex G; Paris, to sit front row at Saint Laurent and Valentino and walk the runway in the Coperni show — so she has an on-demand nurse come and administer a midglam IV drip so discreetly I don’t even notice she’s there until she’s heading out and two members of the crew ask for her card. Without taking a break, Carlson spends the next four hours posing and flashing that wide, megawatt smile Charli herself once immortalized in song.

Being an It Girl isn’t easy. Devon Lee Carlson makes it look like it is. Her best stories usually involve her stumbling right into them. Like: How did she meet Charli? “The first time we met was actually through Dua Lipa — she had a birthday party for her boyfriend at the time, and Charli was there, and then we found out our birthdays are one day apart. We were immediately like, ‘Oh, so we’re besties.’” And what about Nicholson? “I met Duke at a Lana Del Rey concert, backstage.” (Nicholson, grandson of Jack, appeared on the album cover of Rey’s Norman F*cking Rockwell.) “A couple months later, I was at a party and he was there, and then we found out we had the same birthday.”

“When I was first getting to know Devon, the thing that intrigued me most about her was her ability to disarm anyone who she is speaking to with her kindness and warmth,” Nicholson says. “She treats everyone with the same respect regardless of who they are to her.”

He’s not just being a dutiful boyfriend here: Making friends everywhere she goes is a big part of the whole Carlson package. “Devon has really redefined what we think of as an It Girl because she has a kindness that has not in previous decades been associated with It Girls,” says British Vogue contributing editor Julia Hobbs. “When we think of It Girls, we think of someone who’s audacious and has head-turning style. They’re risque when it comes to what they wear. They stay out really late, and they’re kind of a bit naughty in the way that we would all love to be. Devon has really remolded and redefined what we think of as it.”

“A lot of younger girls keep coming up to me like ‘You helped me find my style’ or ‘You raised me.’ It makes my day every time.”

Carlson didn’t grow up around all these connections. She was raised in Newbury Park, a Los Angeles suburb about 20 minutes west of Calabasas and, according to Carlson, fairly removed from the entertainment world. “I feel like I had a real proper childhood,” she says. “I went to a football games, had a thousand kids in my grade. It was pretty normal.” She danced competitively in high school — “It was my one and only thing that I loved besides shopping and dogs” — until an injury took her out. “I sprained my back, and then Wildflower started a week later,” she says. “It was a wild turn of events.”

Wildflower is a family business, run by both Carlson sisters as well as their parents, Michelle and Dave, and favored by everyone whose style is obsessively pinned and reblogged on Pinterest and Tumblr (which, by the way, the girls are very much still using in 2025, according to Carlson): Lana, Dua, Olivia Rodrigo. (This morning, a girl at baggage claim complimented Carlson on her personal WF case without, as far as Carlson knows, realizing whom she was complimenting.) The brand’s approach is simple: cute designs, fun colors, and minimal branding, with just a simple silver WF on the bottom corner. “I want to make something for everyone,” Carlson says. “I want everyone with any type of style to come to our website and find something that they like. The things that mean the most to me are when people say they met their friends when going to college or starting a new school and seeing another girl that has a Wildflower case... It’s kind of like a club.”

It’s true: During Paris Fashion Week, Hobbs says she was shopping at Nuovo when a young woman approached her to say hi and later mentioned that she bought the Wildflower smile case — featuring Carlson’s so-perfect-you’d-think-it’s-AI grin — after seeing Hobbs sport it. “She was really nice,” Hobbs says, “which reinforces my Devon theory that nice people like Devon attract nice followers, and in what can sometimes be a negative world, we should shine a light on people like Devon who are kind and smart and do nice things which uplift other people.”

“I’m still low-key niche. It’s like my superpower: I get to still navigate this world, but only for the girls who get it.”

The sisters originally just wanted to make something cute for themselves. “We were really obsessed with Tumblr, and my mom was making us studded shorts that were popular on there at the time, and she made a phone case that matched that whole vibe,” Carlson says. “We started selling them to our friends at school.” A chance encounter, naturally, with Miley Cyrus changed everything: Devon and Sydney, then both still teenagers, saw Cyrus at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and asked for a selfie. When the pop star complimented their phone case, they grabbed an extra from the car to give her. A few days later, Cyrus tweeted a selfie with the case and a note of thanks. Demand exploded.

“We had literally no inventory, and I was working at a go-karting place at that time,” Carlson recalls with a laugh. But the family decided to go all in: Michelle and Dave sold their house and moved into a rental owned by a family member to fund the business; Michelle quit her job as a sales associate to work on the brand, while Dave, a graphic designer who owned his own marketing firm, juggled both businesses until he eventually focused on Wildflower full time. “When my dad quit his job, we were like, ‘OK, now everyone has to hold up their share of the company,’” Carlson says. “We all a hundred percent depend on each other.”

Thirteen years later, the cases have stayed in vogue thanks in part to a savvy eye for collaboration. Wildflower first partnered on a case with YouTuber Maddi Bragg in 2015, back when influencer brand collabs as we know them were hardly A Thing. Today, they’ve worked with everyone from Gracie Abrams to Nara Smith to Bella Hadid. “I’d say most of the time, we’re reaching out to them,” Carlson says. “And we’re shocked every time they say yes — even our friends.”

That’s less of a surprise when you consider the other secret sauce of Wildflower: Carlson herself. She’s a true girls’ girl everyone simply wants to hang out with. “She’s the biggest big sister ever,” Sydney tells me during Paris Fashion Week, where she’s just attended Balenciaga’s Spring 2026 show. “She was telling everyone, ‘Sydney, tell them what you did with Balenciaga. Show them what you did.’ She’s so proud to be a big sister. And I know she does that to me because I am her sister, but that’s literally how she treats all her friends and people.” (Plus, she can ball out with the best of them: “She is more of a party girl in a way that people wouldn’t expect. Everyone thinks I’m the going-out sister, but it’s Dev that gets me to go out most of the time.”)

“I love having friends that are all bosses. We’ll do a whole day of shooting or be planning our brands’ feed — over Aperols, of course.”

Francesca Aiello, the founder of Frankies Bikinis who’s known Carlson since they were teenagers, describes her role in their friend group as “making everyone feel good 24/7,” adding, “she’s really like a walking ray of sunshine.” Photographer Morgan Maher, who has shot a number of campaigns for Wildflower, calls her “absolutely electric.” These qualities make Carlson a great partner in business, too. “There is no ego involved when creating with her, and she has never made any idea I’ve had feel small or unimportant,” Maher says.

In 2022, Aiello and Carlson teamed on a line to celebrate both brands’ 10-year anniversaries. “Being able to work with Devon is always such a dream, because she has such a unique vision and eye with everything, whether it’s designing an outfit, a bikini, a phone case, you name it,” she says. “People really feel the authenticity of her in all of her work, and see that shine in 2025, when so much is forced and people just want you to buy things to make more money. She’s doing something because she loves it, and she’s proud of it at all times. Nothing about her is fake. I’ve never met a more authentic person, truly.”

“I work on Wildflower every single day,” Carlson says. “It is my full-time job.” But you can’t exactly put It Girl on your LinkedIn — and there’s a lot more to the business of Devon Lee Carlson than running her actual business. Since 2017, she’s had a YouTube channel where she posts vlogs chronicling both the aspirational (Coachella, fashion shows) and the accessible (thrift hauls, running errands in L.A.). Her Instagram is effectively a showcase for her outfits of the day and various nights out. “There’s no thought process,” Carlson says. “I’ve just always overshared, and I’ve always liked clothes.” But a few cute outfits don’t typically lead to 1.5 million followers — surely there’s something deeper people are responding to? “I literally don’t know,” Carlson says with a laugh, aware of how it sounds. “I think people just f*cked with the vibe, whatever that vibe is.” (I ask Aiello for her theory: “The Devon touch,” she explains, is “having a sense of confidence in what you’re wearing and what you’re doing because you know that you are the creator of your look.”)

For Carlson, work and leisure frequently overlap. “I love having friends that are all bosses. It’s kind of the best feeling.” Do they ever talk business? “Of course, it’s what we bond over,” she says. “We’ll do a whole day of shooting [content] or be planning our brands’ feed — over Aperols, of course. We’re literally just girls.”

“People say they met their friends when starting a new school and seeing another girl that has a Wildflower case. It’s like a club.”

The influencer Stas Karanikolaou recalls a St. Tropez boat trip this summer with Carlson, Kylie Jenner, and Victoria Villarroel that quickly turned into TikTok fodder. “We all brought our books down to the deck with the intention of having a chill reading afternoon,” Karanikoloau says. “Next thing you know, it turned into a full brainstorming session. We ended up talking for hours about all of these ideas we had and things we wanted to create. I don’t think I ever even opened my book. It’s so special to have a group of girlfriends who genuinely want to see everyone win. We’re all constantly cheering each other on, and I think we are so lucky to have that.”

Recently, while scrolling through TikTok, I came across a millennial creator mourning the fact that Gen Z didn’t have an Alexa Chung of their generation to influence not only their style but their whole vibe; the comments section was flooded with the same answer over and over: We have Devon. “I feel like every girl that I’m friends with now loved Alexa Chung growing up,” Carlson says. “You find your tribe. We sat next to each other at a show, and she was telling me about how she wrote It” — her 2013 lifestyle bible — “and I couldn’t believe my ears. Every time she was telling me about it, I was just like, ‘I want to do that.’”

Carlson believes she has a way to go toward achieving style-icon status. “I’m still low-key niche,” she says. “Every time I’ve ever been in Vogue, it’s always like, ‘Who is this?’ And I kind of love it because it’s like my superpower. I get to still navigate this world, but only for the girls who get it. A lot of younger girls now are growing up and in their early 20s, and they keep coming up to me like ‘You helped me find my style’ or ‘You raised me.’ Hearing those things is crazy. It makes my day every time.”

Carlson’s style influence extends to her friends, too. “One day, she came over to help me clean out my closet,” Karanikolaou recalls. “Then a few weeks later, for my birthday this year, she showed up at my house with my tailor and brought pieces she noticed I was missing in my closet. We tried everything on together and ended up having a little fashion show in my living room.” That story, according to Nicholson, is Carlson in a nutshell: “One thing others might not know about her is she is the world’s greatest gift giver,” he says. “Her love of her friends and family is unwavering.”

Once Carlson had the stamp of approval from teenage girls — and her peers — it was only a matter of time before high fashion came calling. Around 2019, she started landing some small but promising opportunities: a Louis Vuitton accessories campaign, an invite to a Saint Laurent show at the Malibu beach she and her friends used to hang out at in high school.

“There’s no thought process. I’ve always overshared, and I’ve always liked clothes. People just f*cked with the vibe, whatever that vibe is.”

Cut to this season, she’s at Paris Fashion Week attending shows from Stella McCartney and Valentino and sitting front row at Saint Laurent in front of the Eiffel Tower alongside Charli, Hailey Bieber, Zoe Kravitz, and Kate Moss. At our dinner, Carlson says she’d like to go to more, but the politics around going to shows from competing brands intimidates her. “I’m such a rule follower. I don’t know if I could enjoy it. I’d be so scared,” she says. “But I’ve had friends be like, ‘F*ck it!’” Still, the fact that she’s not tied fully to one brand — and has relationships with plenty more, including Chanel Fine Jewelry — is a true testament to her influence. Everyone wants to be in the business of being Devon.

“It’s rare that someone’s style reflects their personality so perfectly — but Devon’s does exactly that,” her stylists, the sister duo Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo, share in an email. “She is exactly what you see: the fun, happy, expressive dream girl who the minute she puts on an outfit makes you want it immediately. I’ve been in fittings with her and would never imagine wanting to wear a look she’s about to try on — and then she steps into it, and I’m like, ‘Damn, OK… sold.’ Designers and brands clearly feel the same way.”

Carlson has thought about starting a clothing brand of her own. “Yeah, of course. I’d love to have my own fashion line,” she says, though she is wary of trying to, as she puts it, “just make sh*t to make sh*t.” This past spring, she teamed up with Reformation for a line of girly, party-ready items. “God, doing that Reformation collection unlocked something inside of me that was like, ‘I want to do this forever,’” she says. “That’s what made me think I do want to do it more than I think I do.”

There’s plenty of other things she’d like to try out, too, acting chief among them. She got the bug while spending a stretch of time on location with Nicholson over the summer. “I just love being on set so much that it would be my dream if I could be there every day,” she says. And when Carlson dreams it, she usually finds her way to it soon enough.

Top image credit: Chanel clothing, CHANEL Fine Jewelry earrings, necklace and rings, CHANEL Watches PREMIÈRE RIBBON Watch