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There’s a version of Chrissy Walker’s story that writes itself: founder builds a boutique fashion PR firm, works with a client list of names her industry loves to talk about, keeps her own name comfortably out of it. That’s the version most fashion publicists live inside for their whole career. Chrissy wants a different one.
Chrissy is the founder and CEO of Chrissy Walker Public Relations, known to most in the industry simply as CWPR, operating out of New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and London under the tagline “Creating names worldwide.” Her firm does two things at once: placing clients with the brands and events that build a career, and securing for those same clients the press that makes their careers visible. Most of her roster works in fashion, and it deliberately leans toward actors, models, dancers, musicians, and artists of diverse backgrounds for whom the industry has not always made room.
A path that started in retail, not red carpets
It’s worth knowing what she means by that before assuming it’s just a line. Chrissy studied marketing and management at the Wharton School, then spent time in buying and merchandising at Bloomingdale’s and Gap, the kind of job that runs on sell-through and margin rather than mood boards. From there, she became the first employee at a Google Ventures-backed SaaS startup, building out marketing and influencer programs before “influencer marketing” was a job title anyone printed on a business card. A stretch in publishing at a marketing trade magazine came next, which is where the media instincts and the operating instincts finally met.
It’s an unusual résumé for someone who now spends her days getting models onto the guest list, and that’s rather the point. Chrissy didn’t wander into fashion PR from a styling background. She built toward it from retail and startups, and it shows in how CWPR runs, like a company with accounts, not a publicist with a rolodex.
What the placements actually look like
Take the firm’s work with a variety of modeling agencies. CWPR didn’t just land agencies’ rosters the occasional placement; it opened the door to a network of more than 30,000 fashion and media contacts, and ran a concentrated Fashion Week campaign that put the roster at New York Fashion Week shows, including Kim Shui, Son Jung Wan, Derek Lam and Alice + Olivia, plus brand events with YSL Beauty and Dolce & Gabbana Beauty. That’s the kind of account most agencies would love to have on the books, run the way a company manages a client relationship rather than the way a publicist chases a single booking.
It tracks with the wider numbers, too. The PR Net, which covers the public relations industry, credited CWPR with more than 300 fashion week placements in a single year, as well as partnerships with Loewe, MCM Worldwide, and Jimmy Choo. Chrissy has been named one of the outlet’s Next Gen Honorees each year from 2024-2026, and she has shared a stage on a Wharton Retail Club panel with executives from Alvarez & Marsal, Tiffany & Co., and Adam Lippes, good company for someone who is supposedly “just” a fashion publicist.
Running talent development and public relations from the same firm makes successful partnerships with modeling agencies possible in the first place. A conversation that starts as a booking can turn into a press pitch by the end of the call, and it works the other way just as often, because the person handling the client and the person handling the coverage are the same. Most firms pick a lane. CWPR built both, and Chrissy is now asking her own industry to notice her the same way it notices everyone she’s placed.
In partnership with APG
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