I love the idea of Emma looking like her “own little ornament,” as one of her co-workers described her, dressed in her colorful combinations of outfits at her corporate law firm. The idea of “business casual” doesn’t exist in Emma’s vocabulary. She doesn’t believe in “work clothes:” whatever goes to her office can go to a rock concert, as well. Four and a half hours into my shoot with her, we had barely scratched the surface of her boxes of Eley Kishimoto everything: dresses, skirts and bags within bags. Emma is so obsessed with their aesthetic that she refers to all of her other possessions as “un-Kishimoto.” The pieces are so precious to her that all of it is stored inside out to fully preserve the prints. There are few exceptions to her singular appreciation for the English design house, one of which is the obscure but quintessential, ’60s line Jean Varon by John Bates. I’ve been consumed with owning something of his ever since Emma turned me on to her monumentally stunning hippie dresses from him. Emma’s obsession with collecting became evident at twelve years old, when she got so into buttons that she joined the British Button Society and The Victorian Button Club. She says, “Back in the day, before you bought clothes for a season and chucked them out, which I don’t do, the buttons were jewelry.” Taking things to extremes is Emma’s forte. She showed off a deluge of Phillip Treacy fedoras, all in the same colors with different celebrity portraits silk screened onto them. She’ll buy the same garment in two different sizes just to have it (and because it was a good deal at Century 21). When she considers black to be funereal and decides that cream is the only way to go with shoes, she sees it as a “lifestyle” choice. Her Edwardian pair of Chloés is the picture of distressed beauty. “Fashion” for Emma is a word in the dictionary next to fascist, but putting it all together in her way, utopia.

If you like Emma, you may also enjoy Debra Rapoport, Hannah Dilworth and Susan Cianciolo.