My personal style is eclectic and imaginative. Depending on my mood and the occasion, I might wear contemporary, vintage, masculine or very feminine clothes. If I’m on the rostrum, jackets are everything. My go-to is a navy wool double-breasted YSL jacket with gold buttons – very military-style – and I also love the silver Armani jacket that I wore for the sale of Apex, an 11ft-tall stegosaurus skeleton, in 2024. I always want to be sensitive to the items in the sale – the clothes I wear for a Modern & Contemporary auction are different to those I’ll wear for fossil or manuscript sales. One exception is my hair, which I always wear in a ponytail. When I was auditioning to be an auctioneer at Sotheby’s in 2016, Hugh Hildesley, who was then a senior auctioneer, advised that my hair was hitting the microphone and was a distraction. I’ve tied it up ever since and never have to think about it during a heated auction.
The last thing I bought and loved was a lime-green vinyl Prada purse. It’s lightweight and harks back to the ’90s, though it’s from a recent collection. I use it for everything, from running errands to an evening out.
Kao’s vinyl Prada handbag in front of an early-20th-century tansu (Japanese cabinet) © Heather Sten
