Plenty of people love their cats. Very few have organized an entire identity around them. Fashion historian and curator Laura McLaws Helms, better known online as @laurakitty, is firmly in the second camp, and the remarkable thing is how naturally it all connects: the name, the career, the label she co-founded, even her deep-cut aesthetic fixations all trace back to cats.
What makes it more surprising is that she did not grow up with them. A London native, Helms says she barely encountered a cat until she was about 10, when she slept over at a friend’s house that had one and woke up to find it asleep on her. Something clicked. These days she splits her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York, runs an Instagram account that functions as a compendium of her encyclopedic knowledge of fashion and pop culture, and lives with three cats who thoroughly shape her days.
The cats
There is Laser, who is 21 and came into her life through an ex-boyfriend about 15 years ago. Helms held onto the cat when the relationship ended, and Laser, named after a character from American Gladiators, has been with her ever since.
Then there is Peppermint, who Helms describes as her husband’s cat and who lives upstate with him when he is working there. Peppermint was a found cat, discovered living in a field when the couple went upstate at the start of the pandemic.
And there is Marshmallow, the cat with the biggest cultural footprint, because Helms named her clothing line after him. She had long called anything soft and fluffy “marshmallow,” and the label she started with her Lady Magazine co-founder Susan borrowed the name straight from the cat.
The husband who wasn’t a cat person
Helms is candid that her husband did not arrive a convert. He had grown up assuming he was allergic, since his father was, and had never really spent time with a cat before he started spending time with her. Living alongside Laser and her late cat Misha did the persuading. By now he is enough of a Peppermint devotee that the cat has become, in Helms’s telling, his baby.
The cats earned their keep emotionally during the pandemic, too. When things started feeling ominous in March 2020, her husband drove her, Marshmallow, and Laser upstate, a trip that was itself a first, since she had rarely traveled with them before. Working from home with cats has its costs to productivity, she admits, given how much of the day they spend sleeping on her while she works from the couch, but they were an enormous comfort during an anxious stretch.
A whole aesthetic built around cats
This is where Helms tips from cat owner into cat scholar. Her vintage expertise extends to a shelf of vintage cat books, including a favorite so absurd it delights her, Igor Cassini’s Blue Book of Social Cats, a gossip-columnist’s guide to feline high society. People, knowing her reputation, kept giving her cat-themed objects until she had to call a halt, which she notes is one of the occupational hazards of having your nickname be your favorite animal.
That nickname, by the way, predates the cats. She got “Laurakitty” in her late teens, before she owned a single cat, back when she had started greeting everyone with “meow” instead of “hello.” When she began DJing at 20, her DJ name was Laura Kitty, and it stuck for good.
The Pallas’s cat rabbit hole
Ask about the cat accounts she follows and you get the truest window into how her mind works. Beyond the expected adoption pages, she is obsessive about Pallas’s cats, the small, spectacularly fluffy wild cats also known as manuls, and follows a whole community of fellow devotees who trade videos of them. It is the perfect Helms detail: even her internet rabbit holes are about cats.
She is settled at three, she says, though she follows far too many adoption accounts and is forever tempted by the senior cats who get abandoned and pull at her. For now, the count holds. But you get the sense that in Laura Helms’s world, the cats were never really a phase to grow out of. They are the whole architecture.
