Weedslut Is Building a Sexy Little Universe, One Addison Tour Look at a Time

Zoe Kestan can make a stage feel like home. After enduring a tumultuous media blitz following a very public relationship, the 32-year-old WeedSlut founder re-entered the spotlight after designing a series of Crossroads-inspired costumes for Addison Rae’s world tour. But her journey began all the way back in 2017 when the New York City native introduced the world of WeedSlut to friends and family with a vibrant runway show replete with spliffs and her signature lingerie. Since then, Kestan has been hauling heavy boxes of inventory between apartments, waiting for the right time to relaunch her brand. When that moment arrived last December, the designer caught the eye of Addison’s collaborator, the choreographer and creative director Lexee Smith. As she tells our fashion director Dara (who also happens to be Addison’s tour stylist), the rest is history. The shows, and the clothes, keep selling out. 

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ZOE KESTAN: Hi.

DARA: Hi. Thank you for talking with us and thank you for coming out to L.A. and doing the tour costumes. It turned out so cute, and I love how everyone is looking. 

KESTAN: I’m so happy. It’s crazy seeing how the clothes take on a new form when they start moving. It always looks a little different than I expected, in the best way.

DARA: Totally. Well, you’ve done a lot of amazing costumes with us and Addison, thank you for that. It’s kind of my first rodeo and it is such a crazy process. Have you been designing clothes for a long time?

KESTAN: Yeah. I have to re-remind myself that it’s a different form of designing because it’s more costume than anything. You have to take all these other factors into consideration because the looks are going on the road and they’re going to be worn so many times. But I also learned to sew in a costume shop for theater.

DARA: Oh, really? 

KESTAN: Yeah. I went to a sleepaway camp when I was 12, and I auditioned for the play and didn’t get it. But then they were like, “Do you want to do costume shop?” And that’s how I started sewing. 

DARA: Where did you grow up?

KESTAN: In New York, in the city.

DARA: Okay. Cute.

KESTAN: Yeah. My stepdad, actually, worked in the garment industry my whole life. The first time I ever took the subway by myself, was to going down to Times Square to visit him at work. And at the time, Project Runway was on. What a mood.

DARA: Yeah.

KESTAN: He’d be at work in his office and I would just go downstairs and watch the cutters and the sewers and ask them to let me try things. A lot of it was self-taught. I did take one class at FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] in high school on the weekends, and that was my only sewing and pattern making education.

DARA: You went to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design], right?

KESTAN: Yeah, I did textiles. It gave me a different perspective on how clothes get made. Ultimately, a lot of people in that program went into interiors and art and that kind of thing. The program I was in wanted you to focus on the fabric so I actually got bad grades for trying to make things. But it’s kind of funny now with the work that I’m doing, I still rely on this one folder from my FIT class, which I think is from 2009.

DARA: From high school?

KESTAN: From high school. It’s the only education I had. Everything else is just YouTube or and self-taught.

DARA: That’s amazing. When you came back to New York after school, what was the timeline between that and you starting WeedSlut? 

KESTAN: Well, I was working for Telfar the summer before I graduated and Gerlan Marcel, who did Gerlan Jeans back in 2014. I was just picking up freelance work from here and there. And I had a couple of stylist friends who would need basic garments for commercial shoots. So every now and then I would make a top that they needed for a Sephora campaign or something like that. It was always in my mind that I would get to create some kind of brand. In college I changed my Instagram handle to WeedSlut and it kind of took on its own identity.

DARA: How did you come up with it?

KESTAN: It was right when I first got Instagram in 2013. My friend Freddie Powell, who has a gallery now, came up with it. He was like, “You’re a WeedSlut.”

DARA: It was that era.

KESTAN: The era of ironic usernames. Everybody told me, “You have to change it because nobody is going to take you seriously.” I mean, see how that turned out. [Laughs] Obviously I love smoking weed, so there was that humor to it, but it also fit with the style of the stuff I was designing already. And it was cool to use that for branding because I didn’t want to just be stuck with garment design. I wanted to create a bit of a world. 

DARA: How would you describe the WeedSlut universe?

KESTAN: I would say it’s playful, self-assured, and sexy, of course. Obviously I would love to design stuff for men and unisex things, but there’s this element where, if I was going to design something, it needed to be for a woman who wants to feel beautiful and confident. And that eventually led me to more lingerie-focused stuff. 

DARA: Yeah, playful, silly, sexy.

KESTAN: At face value, certain people would say, “It’s really hard to take a brand with this name seriously.” But there’s layers to it. I’m really detail-focused, whether it’s something in the tag, the little trims, or the bows.

DARA: There’s always something surprising and sweet and for the wearer, which I really like. 

KESTAN: Thanks. I had this phase where I was addicted to buying makeup. I will buy something that I don’t need just because there’s this one little element on the box that just makes me so happy. 

DARA: The joy of experiencing it.

KESTAN: Even on my hang tags, I put a baby pink eyelet on them, which I really didn’t need to do, but that plus metallic gold just gives it that little deliciousness that only the person who’s buying it is going to see. Every step of designing something, you have the chance to put your stamp on it. And obviously when you’re making things for production, that’s where compromises come in. But with Addison’s stuff, we have the opportunity to make each element special and chosen and specific.

DARA: Do you know how Addison first found your designs? Did you send them to her or did she just buy them? 

KESTAN: It was Lexee [Smith], actually. She found the WeedSlut Instagram page. 

DARA: That makes so much sense.

KESTAN: She said she found it because I left a comment on Haley Wollens’ Instagram post, and  I had sent her some stuff when I first launched the website. She immediately was like, “Hey, we’re in New York. Where can we get your stuff?” and I sent them to Café Forgot.

DARA: Wait, I remember when they went to Café Forgot.

KESTAN: Café Forgot didn’t have everything so they were like, “We need the other colors!” I was like, “Okay, give me your address. I’ll send you every color.”

DARA: We were doing a bunch of video shoots in a row, and in  every single one, she’d pull out some new WeedSlut cage panty out of her bag. And we just were like, “Oh my god, these are amazing. What is this?” When they were rehearsing for the album launch show at The Box, Addison was rehearsing in your dress.

KESTAN: In the nude one?

DARA: In the nude one. They were rehearsing and she was like, “I really love how this one feels. What if we just ask Zoe to make us one for the show?” And I was like, “Fab, let’s reach out.” 

KESTAN: That was one of the first things that they sold out of at Café Forgot, and I was like, “I really don’t have that many of those.” I was doing cozy loungewear stuff with this white bamboo fabric that was just soft, cozy, and sexy. Then I had this leftover mesh from the lingerie and I thought, “Okay, I need a little negligee to go over everything.” It was more simple of a design than some of the other things that I had done, but of course, I had to add in the kind of adjustable factor, because that’s what really makes people feel sexy, being able to tie something extra tight and fit it to the way that your body is. 

DARA: Yeah, it’s funny, we kind of dubbed the blue version of that dress with the big aqua sleeves.

KESTAN: From Crossroads.

DARA: Yes. I sent you a picture from the end of Crossroads and was like, “What if we do the dress with these giant sleeves?” And then it turned out so amazing. And then when she opened for Lana at Wembley, we had you do all eight girls in different rainbow colors, because they were like, “We want a giant rainbow on the stage.” It was so much fun.

KESTAN: It was going in this other direction that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of myself. But looking back on it, it feels like such a part of the brand’s DNA. So many people have said that it reminded them of the Muses from Hercules, which it’s my favorite Disney movie of all time. I have a pin of Meg on my bag from my best friend. She’s my Disney girl.

DARA: Oh my god, I love that.

KESTAN: Yeah. I felt like it was taking the brand into something more ’70s, but it was also very contemporary. And the floor-length stuff I thought was just so chic.

DARA: It was really beautiful. I sent you some photos from Halston and Stephen Burrows’ collections for The Battle of Versailles, the iconic ’70s fashion reference, for the rainbow. I like the idea from a distance you just see these colors flying in the wind and I loved how you interpreted that in this way that was really relaxed and super contemporary. Like you’re saying, it still has this yoga pants sexy feeling that’s still so LA hot girl.

KESTAN: Which was part of my growing up. I died for fold-over yoga pants in the sixth grade. You brought up bell-bottoms, and I hadn’t really thought about them in a while. But when I looked back at the show that I did at Paul’s Baby Grand in 2017, I did three different styles of bell-bottoms.

DARA: It feels like your dream wardrobe from when you were 13 or something.

KESTAN: Now I’m 32, and that’s still my dream wardrobe. Right now I’m re-reading the memoir of Pam and Gela from Juicy Couture [The Glitter Plan]. Juicy Couture was all I dreamed about having back then. There were also these Lacoste shoes that came with rainbow stripes and those Puma shoes that had the zigzag Velcro.

DARA: Oh my god. Yeah. 

KESTAN: Hard Tail [Forever], Michael Stars, C&C California, cozy, sexy, casual loungewear. There’s something super luxe and high quality about about all those brands. When I was in LA, my first time sourcing stuff, I went to the place where they had the iconic J zipper made, but I wasn’t at a point where I could purchase 2,000 custom zipper pulls. 

DARA: [Laughs] So what’s next? Are you dreaming of a new collection? 

KESTAN: There’s so many things I would love to do, but it’s about the business and designing with production and the consumer in mind. Based on the response to everything we did for Addison, I’m focusing on a mesh collection, and then going back into lingerie. I definitely have some other new styles I’m super excited to make. I also think my consumer is on the younger side, so it’s always about making sure that it is accessible in some way. Of course, I would love to make the most divine things with lots of special details and fabrics, but it’s been a fun challenge to design within these parameters.

DARA: Do you know when the next drop is going to be?

KESTAN: I’m hoping that by the winter or early January, I should have a new lingerie drop. And I’m also obviously trying to get restocked, because I’m pretty low on everything now. It’s crazy. I only launched the website in December of last year. I was putting it off for so long, and so much has happened since then.

DARA: Yay. It was so much fun to chat.

KESTAN: I know. And congrats to you, because the rest of the show looks so good. 

DARA: Thank you. I can’t believe it’s all real now. It happened so fast. That last minute dress for “In the Rain,” I feel like people are really loving it.

KESTAN: It looks so good with the dance.

DARA: Yeah. Drop the “In the Rain” dress.

KESTAN: Okay, I’ll keep it in mind.