Backstage before a sold-out show, most rising pop stars have a rack wheeled in by a stylist and a team standing by with steamers. Isabel LaRosa has a sewing kit, a bag of Etsy packages and a glitter pot she trusts more than anyone's hands but her own.
"I don't have a stylist"
It is one of the more unusual admissions from a major-label artist with a headline world tour behind her: LaRosa curates every single look herself, no exceptions.
"I don't have a stylist. I do it all myself."Isabel LaRosa, Yahoo EntertainmentThe process, by her own account, is unglamorous in the most literal sense: direct messages to Etsy sellers, late-night scrolls through Depop listings, and weekend stops at flea markets looking for the one vintage piece that fits the era she is currently living in.
Every piece has a purpose, even when the whole look says "I'm not trying."
The Trashy Lingerie kick
Her most cited source of late is a Los Angeles institution that has outfitted rock stars since the 1970s. Trashy Lingerie, handmade in LA since 1974, has become a recurring stop for LaRosa's silk-and-lace tops and matching bloomers, the pieces she pairs to build out her current stage silhouette. She describes the appeal in specific terms: bra-shaped tops that avoid reading as literal bras, layered with pleated, school-uniform-style skirts she calls Tumblr-esque. It is a wardrobe built for a very particular tension, feminine shapes rendered in a darker, more alternative register, which she has described directly as wanting to take traditionally girly elements and make them dark.
Bobby pins, not a wardrobe department
The DIY approach extends past shopping and into damage control. LaRosa has said she keeps bobby pins on her at all times on the road for one specific reason: her clothes are not built to survive two hours of movement on a stage without help. Asked what she can never tour without, she did not hesitate:
"I can't live without lip liner. Or bobby pins, because I'm always pinning my clothes because they shouldn't be falling down. I'm like, I can't be flashing the audience."Isabel LaRosa, GlamcultIt is a small detail that says a lot about how the whole operation runs: custom, secondhand and vintage pieces, held together in real time by a performer who also happens to write, direct and edit her own music videos, a level of control she has described as being a bit of a control freak by nature.
The doll, the raven, the ghost
The look has evolved in step with the music. The all-leather, Hunger Games-adjacent bodysuit that carried her through the earliest viral era gave way, by the time of her debut album Raven and its Psychopomp Tour, to a more ornate silhouette: custom silk, lace and lingerie-inspired staging built around the record's death-and-rebirth mythology. LaRosa has said she has lately been channeling an inner doll look with her own shadowy twist layered on top, a description that lines up with the darker, gothic-rock direction of her 2026 EP Promising Young Woman, released June 5, 2026 via Slumbo Labs and RCA. Reviewers have noted the project trades the sleek, digitally polished sound of Raven for distorted guitars and live instrumentation, and the visual identity has shifted alongside it, described elsewhere as evolving into an almost ghostly aesthetic to match the EP's haunted themes.
A ritual, not a routine
None of this is incidental. LaRosa treats getting into a stage look the way she treats writing a treatment for a video: a small, self-contained creative act she refuses to hand off. That includes the glitter, Danessa Myricks' Fireball shade applied as a pre-stage ritual, and the safety-pin repairs that keep secondhand silk and lace holding together through a full set. Between Thomas LaRosa producing every track she has ever released and Isabel directing every video herself, the wardrobe closes the loop: nothing about the Isabel LaRosa project passes through a hand that isn't hers or her brother's.
Why it still reads as intentional
The paradox is that a wardrobe built from Etsy DMs, Depop hauls and flea-market finds reads, onstage, as fully considered. That is the point. LaRosa has said the goal is a look that appears effortless while every piece is chosen with a reason, mixing girly and alternative registers she says most people only get to see kept separate. It is also, practically, a business decision: an artist who signed to Ari Abdul's label home, Slumbo Labs, at 17 and has spent her career inside a tightly controlled, family-run creative operation was never likely to hand her image to an outside stylist once the audience got big enough to notice.
What comes next
With Promising Young Woman now out and reviewers flagging its gothic-rock pivot as her boldest sonic step since Raven, the wardrobe is likely to keep tracking the sound: heavier textures, a ghostlier palette, the same lingerie-adjacent silhouettes pushed a shade darker. Whatever comes out of the next Etsy order, it will not arrive by way of a stylist's rack. It never has.