Bailey Rose Quiñones on Styling Gabbriette and Prioritizing Fine Art

Los Angeles stylist and multidisciplinary artist Bailey Rose Quiñones is entering a deliberate period of professional recalibration following the high-profile wedding of her longtime friend and client, model-musician Gabbriette. Known in creative circles as @skullsqwat, Quiñones has spent years balancing commercial styling for figures like Ye and Don Toliver with an introspective fine art practice. Now, she is actively restructuring that balance to protect her painting and sculpture from becoming secondary to the logistical demands of fashion production.

The shift comes after an intense season anchored by Gabbriette’s nuptials, where Quiñones served as both stylist and emotional confidant. The wedding required extensive preparation, including multiple fittings for a double-corseted Margiela gown that demanded corset training and precise physical endurance. Quiñones describes the experience as transformative but exhausting, prompting a post-event period of journaling and goal-setting aimed at redirecting energy toward personal artistic output rather than external validation through celebrity association.

This tension between service-based styling and autonomous art-making defines much of Quiñones’ career trajectory. After gaining early recognition as lead stylist at Yeezy, she stepped away to pursue a solo painting exhibition titled “GIMP” at Medium Exchange Gallery in New York in 2022. Despite critical support, the vulnerability of presenting deeply personal work left her unprepared to commodify her art. She returned to freelance styling in Los Angeles not out of preference, but as a means of financial stability that wouldn’t require turning sacred creative expression into a business model.

Her approach to styling remains rooted in intimacy rather than industry convention. Working primarily within a tight-knit creative circle that includes photographer Indiana and tattoo artist David, Quiñones treats each project as a collaborative studio effort rather than a hierarchical assignment. With Gabbriette specifically, the relationship transcends traditional client-stylist dynamics; they share aesthetic references ranging from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to 1980s Phantom of the Opera, and make decisions based on mutual trust rather than brand alignment or trend forecasting. This friendship-first methodology often extends fittings beyond standard timelines, as Quiñones will restart entirely if she senses discomfort, prioritizing psychological safety over schedule efficiency.

The physical toll of this devotion became evident during the wedding preparations. The Margiela dress, sourced during a shopping trip in London and later modified with designer approval despite initial hesitation, proved so restrictive that Gabbriette nearly fainted during a final fitting for Vogue. The garment had to be cut off and reassembled multiple times before achieving the desired silhouette, creating what Quiñones recalls as a suspenseful race against time on the wedding day itself. Such moments underscore why she views styling not merely as image-making but as caretaking—a role that requires emotional bandwidth incompatible with treating art as just another revenue stream.

Quiñones’ visual language across mediums shares common DNA: textured, fog-like compositions that merge Victorian restraint with industrial chaos, informed by a lifelong engagement with gothic and emo subcultures. Her childhood in Pasadena included formative experiences cutting friends’ bangs in middle school bathrooms and embracing Christian metal band Flyleaf as spiritual touchstone—elements that continue to surface in her mature work. Family influence also persists; her mother Donna McKenna’s refined thrift-store sensibility and tea-party elegance remain foundational, especially poignant after their Altadena home was lost in the 2025 L.A. wildfires, making surviving garments and heirlooms irreplaceable artifacts.

As she moves forward, Quiñones frames styling as sustenance rather than identity—a way to extract enough creative nourishment to survive while preserving space for art that resists optimization. The distinction matters in an industry where multidisciplinary practitioners are often pressured to monetize every facet of their vision. For now, her priority is maintaining boundaries that allow painting and sculpture to remain realms of exploration rather than performance, ensuring that the very practices that sustain her creatively aren’t consumed by the machinery that pays her bills.