Meet Trevor Ballin, the Fashion World’s Go-To Tarot Card Reader

Everyone knows by now that no creative director works alone. Behind every big-name designer is a cadre of supporting talents whose remit is purely creative, unburdened by the demands of marketing, PR, and the bottom line. Trevor Ballin, 52, has been one of those key players since 1996, when Isaac Mizrahi hired the low-key kid right after Ballin graduated from New York’s Parsons School of Design and put him to work on his signature line because “he can do everything,” as Mizrahi says. From there, it was off to Michael Kors, “back when there were, like, 18 employees total,” Ballin recalls. He went on to work for Oscar de la Renta, Derek Lam, Proenza Schouler, and Polo Ralph Lauren, when Michael Rider was the creative director of womenswear. One of Ballin’s responsibilities was to lead the dress department, where he whipped up garments such as a crisp black and white striped number. The fabric was costly for Polo, but he just had a feeling; Taylor Swift ended up wearing the dress for her engagement photos with Travis Kelce. It pays to trust your gut.

“Trevor doesn’t listen to noise,” says Rider, who brought Ballin with him to Paris to do concepting when Rider was hired to run Celine. Ballin’s role meant working ahead of the rest of the design team, feeding them colors, fabrics, and references for the coming season. “He’s unbothered by convention,” Rider adds. “He’s looking for what cuts through. He’s not coming with stacks and stacks of mood boards, which is how everyone works now. It’s not like, ‘Okay, the brief from Michael is X, so I’m going to go do that.’ It’s like, ‘I couldn’t look away from this fuzz ball.’ He would probably say something offhand to explain it, like, ‘It’s divine inspiration.’ ”

Funny that Rider would use those words, because Ballin’s other special talent, which takes up a large chunk of his personal time, is reading tarot cards. He’s been at it his whole adult life and now has a roster of swanky regulars: Mizrahi, Rider, Dior creative director Jonathan Anderson, and the actors Dan Levy, Emma Corrin, Sarah Paulson, and Ruth Negga, among others. People consult the tarot for all sorts of divinatory reasons; Ballin prefers to focus on their personal lives and their potential for the upcoming year. “He has a very, very good bedside manner,” says Mizrahi. “We’ve all been to those readings where they go, ‘God, darling, you’ve done nothing but make mistakes.’ Trevor always sees something positive.”

Tarot first appeared in Ballin’s life when he was 16. He watched Fashion Television in his native Niagara Falls, Ontario, and liked to make clothes, but he was “misunderstood and bullied,” he says. “I didn’t have a lot of friends and didn’t see a lot of potential for the future. My mom suggested that her best friend, a woman named Anna Pratt, read my cards.” Pratt was an important presence when Ballin was growing up, tag-teaming with Ballin’s mother, Patricia, who worked in a bank, to help newly single women find their footing. Patricia would help the ladies establish credit, and Anna would provide a little guidance from the beyond—or at least the collective unconscious, which is what most tarot practitioners believe the cards really tap into.

“Anna said to me, ‘You’re such a visual person. You make clothes; you’re an artist. You love fashion and storytelling.’ I was blown away by how the cards could articulate so much about myself. She gave me a deck, which is the one I still use today,” Ballin says. It’s a Rider-Waite design, the most iconic and recognizable of the growing number of decks on the market.

In readings, which usually last about an hour and a half, Ballin also uses a pair of vintage Italian dice to answer questions of timing, and three or four antique decks he’s collected over the years to address specific queries that might come up near the end. One is a one-of-a-kind Roma set hand-drawn on the backs of German tax forms. “When I bought it, I really wanted to frame it and preserve it, but then I thought it was so special, I just needed to use it,” he says. Another heirloom deck, dating back to 1909 and featuring a series of mostly animal images accompanied by astrological symbols, just found its way into Celine’s spring 2027 menswear show, in the form of charms around the neck of a suede vest.

Ballin began reading for friends when he started working full-time in fashion. “At the watercooler, you hear about the real lives of people you work with,” he says. He realized he might be able to help others, just like Pratt had once helped him. “I’m not really good at reading for myself,” he says, adding that he doesn’t use the cards to forecast world events or anything related to work, like, say, the color of the moment or who is going to get the top job at a major fashion house. “I don’t think I’m psychic,” he says. “But I can tell someone a story that’s relevant to their lives and that they need to hear in that moment.” His only requirement is that the first time he reads for someone, they come in person. “They need to be in front of me and touch and shuffle my cards, and put them in order to sort of program them.”

That was how I ended up at his duplex apartment in the Marais, silently focusing on what kind of guidance I needed while I cut several decks, including the Rider-Waite, into three piles. As generally affirming as a reading with Ballin is, the experience is not all puppies and rainbows. But warnings come couched in concrete advice. “You’re just going to have to put one foot in front of the other and manage your time,” he said to me about a period of overwork he saw coming up. “You’re going to be in this creative mode, and it’ll be the last thing you want to do, but you’re going to have to make choices.” Toward the end of the reading, he asked me to shuffle the Roma cards, then turned one over; it revealed a spider in a web. “Oh, look, someone’s talking shit!” he said. When I started to stab at names of people who it could be, he was soothing. “It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Think about it—when we see a spider web, we just take a paper towel and sweep it away.”

Ballin is also an obsessive knitter and gives out minimalist sweaters and hats to people (and dogs) he loves. “I used to knit in every free moment,” he says. “It was so good for my nervous energy, and I loved how long it would take to make something entirely by hand. I’ve gone through phases when I didn’t knit, and I felt really not mentally healthy.” He put his needles down only after developing carpal tunnel syndrome, turning to a pair of vintage Swiss machines from the 1960s with manual shuttlecocks—reassuringly lo-fi compared to the computerized models of today. He has a separate room in his apartment set aside for the looms, as well as a small storehouse of very, very luxurious cotton and cashmere yarns.

“The intricacy and scale of what he’s doing is mind-boggling,” says Rider. “There are 50 or 60 steps, including hours of painstaking threading. Those machines are a lost art, and even people who work in high-end knitting factories today don’t know them anymore.” Rider has many of Ballin’s sweaters, which he wears “like T-shirts. I garden in them. I wear them after a run. I throw them in bags. They’re objects of beauty years and years in.”

It has never occurred to Ballin to try to sell them. Nor has it occurred to him to start a brand of his own. “I’ve seen designers just starting out who are now making all the decisions, running a business, when they just wanted to sketch and research and design clothes,” he says. “I want to be able to go home and shut all that off.”

Similarly, Ballin has never charged for his readings. He prefers to maintain the freedom to choose who he reads for, trusting that the right people will find him at the right time—which shouldn’t be more than once or twice a year. “Doing readings is a really great way for me to counterbalance the stress and challenges of life,” he says. “I’m sort of shy, and cards cut through all the bullshit and let me say something meaningful.”

On-set Producer: Tomoya Fujimoto.