“I’m feeling a little bit nervous right now,” Flau’jae Johnson says from the glam chair in her Midtown hotel room, flanked by hair and makeup artists while a nail technician was filing away at her hands. “I was playing it cool. And [now] I’m nervous. But I’m excited. It’s like a good nervous thing.”
The LSU star along with the rest of the WNBA 2026 draft class barely have a chance to get nervous leading up to draft night. Many of the players were competing in the NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament just over a week ago, and within days of being drafted they’ll move to their new city and gear up for the start of the season on May 8.
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Johnson had a big night ahead of her, where she would be drafted eighth overall by the Golden State Valkyries and then traded to the Seattle Storm within an hour. Ahead of all that, she was prepping for the orange carpet with her family by her side, as well as stylist Elly Karamoh.
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Johnson is one of the biggest stars entering the WNBA, already with 2 million Instagram followers and a side career as a musician. She arrived in New York last week and shot a music video at the Empire State Building, in addition to draft commitments and eating “Sweetgreen every day.”
For the draft, Johnson and Karamoh selected a runway dress by French Algerian designer Bent Kahina.
“First we did a fitting. [Elly] had 200 dresses laid out and we were going through dresses and I liked the couple options that he picked, and he had a lot of dresses that I could have worn, but [this] just stuck out. It was a moment,” Johnson says. “And I felt really good when I put it on.”
She was pairing the velvet cutout gown with a black mink stole, diamonds and a Judith Leiber panther clutch.
“It was always elegant, but also mature and going into closing in one chapter and going into another,” Johnson says of how she wanted to feel. “I’m going to be a professional now, a real woman with a job living on my own. I wanted this dress to reflect that, but also it’s draft night and everyone wants to look good and feel good.”
Off the court, Johnson says there is nothing she won’t wear.
“I wear a little bit of everything because I feel like I can pull anything off,” she says. “I think that’s a confidence thing. I like to be outside of the box. One day I’ll go sweats, one day I’ll go high fashion.”
Johnson appeared on the cover of Teen Vogue in the fall, and the experience has inspired her to take more risks fashion-wise.
“It made me want to really experiment with my look, my styles, my hair. Changing it all up and becoming a character anytime I wear outfits,” she says.
For the celebration post-draft, she and her family booked a party bus to “be outside in New York having a ball.” Johnson is already all packed up from LSU and ready to head to her new hometown and get to work.
“I don’t know where I’m going to be, but I know wherever I’ll go, it’s where I’m meant to be,” she says.