BEVERLY HILLS, CA.- Earlier this year, Sarah Staudinger began taking a Polaroid of nearly every person to visit her freshly renovated home.

“There’s a few people that I’ve missed, but I try to get everybody,” she said. “Even people I don’t really know.”

The book of Polaroids she has amassed included, in August, her mother, her pickleball instructor, blockbuster producer Joel Silver and acclaimed painter Mark Bradford. As she turned each page, pointing to the faces, her voice was low, relaxed, unbothered.

“This is one of my best friends.” Flip. “That’s Alice, who helped with the wedding.” Flip. “He’s an agent at WME.” Flip.

“Here, we had just moved in, and it was the most random crew,” she said, arriving at some poolside photos. “P. Diddy just hands everybody a blunt.”

Schooled by a lifetime surrounded by celebrities, Staudinger, 33, didn’t change her tone no matter who it was. Her godmother is Cher, whom she called Shere Khan as a child, like the “Jungle Book” villain. She attended a private all-girls school in Brentwood. Almost everyone in her life calls her Staud rather than Sarah, and that is also the name of her modest-size fashion line, which has become closely associated with celebrities who wear the brand in their everyday lives: Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Sophie Turner.

Her world was already very Los Angeles, but it became even more so in May, when she married Ari Emanuel. Emanuel’s career as an agent famously inspired Ari Gold’s character on “Entourage,” but his influence today, as CEO of Endeavor, reaches beyond Hollywood. His company’s holdings include talent agencies IMG and WME — representing athletes, authors, musicians, models and many of the behind-the-scenes people who make those professions possible — along with the art fair Frieze, the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Miss Universe.

In a short time, Staudinger went from fireworks-close-out-her-New-York-Fashion-Week-show famous to paparazzi-stake-out-her-Greek-vacation famous.

For the most part, she has just found that funny.

Made in Los Angeles

Staudinger’s parents met at Fred Segal, where her mother, Joanna, oversaw the jewelry, lingerie and sunglasses shops in the mid-1980s. Staudinger’s father, Walter, was a German businessman who’d brought raucous nightlife and casinos to Munich. He was visiting Los Angeles when they fell in love, said Staudinger, who was born at Cedars-Sinai hospital in 1989.

The family moved to Miami for a few years, but after her parents divorced, her mother returned to Los Angeles with Staudinger and her younger brother.

One recent afternoon, while driving to her store on Melrose Place in her electric pickup, Staudinger nodded to the house where she lived as a teenager. It was big and white with six tall pillars out front, the kind of house you’d envision if your knowledge of the Westside was built on the pop culture of Staudinger’s youth, like “Clueless” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

After graduating from high school, Staudinger attended the New School in New York, focusing on media studies, though taking some fashion courses at Parsons, too. “The clothing business was in our blood,” said Joanna, whose father was the president of Mode O’Day, a large chain of clothing stores founded in Los Angeles in the 1930s. In the 1970s, Joanna designed popular rhinestone T-shirts and ballet shoe wedges; she was a “bohemian child,” she said, wearing silk skirts, stacked bracelets and “hippie hair.” But she had an innate sense for “what everybody wanted to wear.” So did her best friend, Cher.

All of these influences stuck with Staudinger, who rifled through her mother’s closet from a young age. (This doesn’t account for the style influences on her father’s side: his “free-spirited St.-Tropez friends” included people like the model-muse Uschi Obermaier, who’d “wear jewelry and basically nothing else,” Staudinger recalled.)

Staudinger’s first job, in 2011, was as a buyer for Reformation, which was focused on reworking vintage clothing. In her two years there, she rose to fashion director, by which time the brand was resonating with millennials for dresses that seemed as eco-friendly as they were “slutty,” as Staudinger called them, fondly.

But Reformation wasn’t “the gap that I saw missing in the marketplace,” she said. The gap she saw — the one that drove her to start Staud in 2015 with George Augusto — was higher-quality products at lower prices. In her mind, there was a customer who was “a cool young person” who wanted a nice, luxury, logo-less handbag — like one by Celine, the Row, Loewe, Bottega Veneta — but couldn’t afford more than $350, let alone $1,500.

Staud grew into a full line of clothing and accessories based on her nostalgic tastes, with 1990s minimalism meeting 1970s grooviness — Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in the streets, Cher in the sheets.

(Cher, by the way, doesn’t mind her closet playing muse. “Look, there are only so many inspirations,” she said, and Staudinger has “made them her own.”)

The aesthetic package can be hard to articulate, even for the people closest to her. It’s based primarily on Staudinger’s “feminine instinct and intuition,” Augusto said.

But it can be traced to Staudinger’s childhood, spent largely in observation mode, her mother said.




“I wanted her to be aware of what she looked like, what she acted like,” Joanna said. “We’d drive by a group of older girls, and I’d say, ‘OK, Sarah, which girl do you think has class?’ She would say, ‘The girl in the red dress’ or something. I’d say: ‘You’re going to be standing in that circle one day. Which girl do you want to be?’”

Cher said Staudinger is “very tasteful”: “You can see that in her designs but also somehow in the way she behaves.”

It’s her combination of regality and total relaxation — a former Reformation colleague said she used to joke “that Staud had the same personality as the Dude from ‘The Big Lebowski’” — that most suits her present social life: attending dinners with entertainment executives; tanning while “the boys watch sports” in the screening room being built inside her pool house; playing pickleball with whomever happens to drop by the house.

Is it a fairy tale if there’s no rags-to-riches story? She did nickname her husband “my prince.”

An Accidental Text

Staudinger began dating Ari Emanuel in 2017 after a long pursuit that began with one of her investors telling her, “You have to go out with my friend.” “I said, ‘OK, what’s his name?’ I looked him up, and I was like: ‘Absolutely not. He’s way too old for me.’” She was 27. He was 55.

When Emanuel got Staudinger’s phone number, the onslaught began. “As Ari does, he’ll just call and call and call,” she said, referring to Emanuel’s reputation for tenacity.

After three months of ignoring him, Staudinger said, she accidentally texted Emanuel one day, intending the message for someone named Arianna. This time, she agreed to meet up. They had “an amazing conversation,” but Staudinger believed they were still better as friends. “I was so involved in work and, like, dating stupid rockers,” she said. At the time, Staud was building toward $20 million in revenue for 2018, according to Forbes.

They began regularly texting each other articles. (Staudinger is a voracious content consumer. In the same conversation, she’ll recommend a documentary on music in 1971, a book on Los Angeles in 1974 and a TikTok about brain vibrations.) Emanuel would then send “crazy gifts” related to those articles, like a walking treadmill desk, she said.

Their first real date was in St.-Tropez, France, where Staudinger was visiting her father; Emanuel flew there to take her out. They had dinner at the restaurant Senequier — a night that began, she said, with them leaving another restaurant because Emanuel had “yelled at French people for smoking” and ended early the next morning with a “walk of shame back home through the fish market.” After all that resistance, “I fell in love with him right away,” she said.

Five years later, the first night of their three-day St.-Tropez wedding was held at Senequier. The ceremony was later officiated by Larry David. The wedding was a paparazzi target. Leaked guest names included Brad Pitt, who didn’t end up attending, disappointing the single women who’d wanted Staudinger to seat them nearby, and Elon Musk, who spent much of the wedding in conversation with David or with Staudinger’s 11-year-old half brother.

Musk’s presence at the couple’s summer vacation in Greece, a few months after the wedding, also attracted paparazzi. Initially, some tabloids mistook Staudinger as Musk’s new “mystery woman.”

“We were hysterically laughing,” she said. “But the second time wasn’t funny, because I didn’t like how mean they were to Elon.” She was referring to a series of photos taken of the group swimming; the shirtless Musk became a meme. “He was unaffected by it, but I didn’t love it,” she said, calling her friend a “genius, obviously” but “so regular, it’s honestly shocking.”

The couple discouraged wedding gifts, although Staudinger noted that several well-wishers sent “Hermès blankets, which is, I guess, a standard wealthy person thing to send as a congratulations.” The most thoughtful gift she received, she said, was from friends who commissioned a ceramic sculpture of Staudinger’s favorite type of chips. (She is deeply obsessed with chips and, in particular, a vegan take on pork rinds called Snacklins.) The bag now hangs in a guest bathroom of their estate, which was bought in 2020, reportedly for $27.5 million.

It is, with no disrespect to the ceramist, comparatively low on the list of their home’s impressive artworks. Emanuel is a collector of Black contemporary artists: In the entryway, there is a large painting by Kara Walker depicting a slave market; in the living room, a portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney; over the winding stairway, a painted drape by Sam Gilliam; above a fireplace, Benny Andrews’ painting of a Black man raising fists to the flag; in a hallway, works on leather by Winfred Rembert, inspired by his time on a chain gang; upstairs, a plaster sculpture by Karon Davis of Staudinger and Emanuel embracing, commissioned by Staudinger.

On a tour of the rooms, Staudinger also pointed out an ice bath, a hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber and various other machines that promise better health; she and Emanuel are fixated on wellness. He was a vegan until she persuaded him to read “The Carnivore Code.” He now eats meat twice a week, although the couple are “lectin-free and pretty much grain-free.”

Emanuel kept his distance during my interviews with Staudinger, although she called him at one point to relay a health question: Is there such a thing as too many probiotics, which I wondered after looking at the assortment of teas and seltzers in their fridge, and to which the answer seemed complicated.

Like many modern Californians, Staudinger is interested in biohacking and psychedelics; one Staud collection was inspired by a mushroom trip. Earlier this month, on a trip to New York during which she opened a Staud store in SoHo — one of about a dozen the company hopes to open in the next two years — she met with her favorite facialist, Fatma Shaheen of Skin Design London. Shaheen uses radio frequency, ultrasound and cupping, with devices that look like pens, hooked up to machines that beeped like heart monitors as she worked.

As the skin around Staudinger’s cheekbones was being, in Shaheen’s words, “traumatized,” Staudinger said that she had recently signed a lease on space for her design team in a midcentury Los Angeles building owned by Courteney Cox. Staud has outgrown its dog-friendly office in the Echo Park neighborhood, where the “homelessness situation just got so out of control,” she said.

Finding the right “energy and vibe” in a new space has been hard, Staudinger said. She has grown to hate open-office layouts, describing a scenario in which the enthusiasm of a creative meeting might be dampened by a passerby from the business team, dropping in to say “the margins are really low” on whatever idea was behind discussed.

“That doesn’t work for me,” she said. When she likes an idea, she won’t drop it, even if she’s told it won’t sell. “I don’t care.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.