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Like Michel, stylist Michael Biondo develops long-term relationships with each client.  He likes to focus on a small number of clients and get to know each of them intimately. He recently returned from a five-week trip with the opera singer Deborah Voigt, where he planned her dinner parties and cocktail hours as well as dressed her in immaculate gowns.

After graduating from the Fashion Institute of Philadelphia, Biondo belonged to the old guard of personal shoppers. He started out at Macy’s and said he was one of the department store’s first ever male personal shoppers.  Today, he also designs interiors and produces events out of his company Michael Biondo Lifestyle Design.

Despite his jet-setting lifestyle, Biondo doesn’t like to put on airs and tries to find
his clients the best deal he can.  “I’m a different kind of personal stylist because I
do not go by names at all,” he said.  To
save a client money, he’ll go to the fabric district to make a wrap skirt or use costume jewelry instead of the real thing, all for the price of $150-an- hour or $1000-a-day.

That tends to be the going rate in this town for personal style consultants.  It may not come cheap, but it saves the harried woman (or man) valuable time and energy, said Dorian May, who was selected New York magazine’s best personal shopper of 2003.

“It’s like having a personal trainer,” said May.  “I come in, rip through the closet, find the good and the bad and basically come up with a shopping plan… The point is they want me to do it for them. A lot of women don’t like to shop; they just want to look good.”

May, who studied at Parsons School of Design in Paris and has a master's in Journalism from New York University, honed her skills covering fashion for the syndicated television show Access Hollywood. She said her clients have ranged from a lion tamer to socialites to an Asian singer who is known as the “Korean Madonna.”

When she’s not dressing the rich and famous, May volunteers at The Bottomless Closet, a charity organization for women recently released from jail or coming off welfare.

Most of the time, May, a mother of two from Manhattan, hits the stores with her notebook, tracking the newest collections.  But, like Biondo, she avoids faddy trends. The most important part of her job, she said, is teaching people how to build a wardrobe that will last from season to season.

Tailoring a style that is both unique and durable in the ever-changing world of fashion is a goal most stylists share.  Hiring a personal stylist is “an investment,” said stylist Joan Darrow.  She identifies the clothing that most flatters each of her clients and that, in 15 years, will still be in style.

Darrow has been a stylist at heart since the age of five and learned most of what she knows from the women in her family.  When she was young, her mother used to get together with her sisters on Saturday afternoons and talk fashion. She started styling professionally about 20 years ago.  At the time, she was an airline flight attendant and began dressing up her coworkers and roommates and giving them hair and makeup advice.  Styling started taking up so much of her time that she had to start charging for it.

“It isn’t about the clothes.  It’s about showing you off."

“We don’t want to look Upper East Side.  We don’t want to look English or Parisian.  We just want to look fabulous,” Darrow said.  And, she says, looking fabulous doesn’t mean dressing head to toe in designer labels – it means looking one’s best.  In Darrow’s experience, enhancing one’s style “transforms life.” 

“It isn’t about the clothes,” she said.  “It’s about showing you off.  And the people around sit up and take notice.”