Taylor Moore

“You have to remember your soul, goals, amenity, and the big picture, but at the same time you don’t want to be consumed by the big picture. You have to see the trees not the forest.” Taylor Moore

Taylor says that for him, style is incorporating his surroundings and developing his own interpretation of what he sees. He is from a small, “WASPy” town on the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama (“we go sailing on the weekends”). His life is a visual journal, like his grandfather’s cardigans and WWII sunglasses, his grandmother’s broaches, a studded bow tie and jackets given to him by friends, and a black leather bomber from the Lower East Side. Interior design and painting are all included in his illustrated story, but it’s done with huge overtones of humor and irony. Madonna, among other things, were windows into “another world” as a child; thus, he painted a larger-than-life portrait of her in his bedroom, which he finds “liberating.”
I admire that Taylor feels so deeply about the people in his life, and that he feels more compelled to wear their things rather than the latest and greatest. He says that he would rather have a hug than a new bag, and he feels that we are heading towards a time where humanity means more to people than consumption. Taylor is clearly not short on depth in his thinking, and

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Mark Hester

occupation: lover of life, sex club worker, artist, writer, and mysterious man of your dreams

“Clothes shouldn’t stop you. They should help you, and they should exemplify what you’re going for. They should enhance, they should be what you’re doing constantly, they should be your voice, in a sense. They are. It’s your non-verbal ‘putting everything out there without saying anything.’” Mark Hester

I feel as if I am on an archeological dig uncovering gems who’s voices are not being heard and should be. Mark is a graduate of Georgetown University in sociology (he is “fascinated by others”), is a voracious reader of the classics from an early age (Nietzsche, Proust, Freud, Chekhov, and Bronte), a product of a family who moved a lot and as a result, has lived all over the world, and was free enough to rid himself of all technology for a year and live in a tree house. He looks like a character in a Shakespearean play in his romantic blouses, fur capes, velvet two-piece ensembles, and tights. And he is a Renaissance man in his wide-open curiosity for life. Mark was born on “the day of wonder,” and says that he refuses to live in a defined box. He is as thoughtful at putting himself “out there” in a “non-verbal” way in his style as he is with his words, while remaining completely unpretentious and a genuine class act.

To learn more about Mark, go to the detailed captions page.

If you like Mark, you might also enjoy Houman Farahmand, Terry T., or Marika Wilson.

Fatima Al Qadiri

occupation: musician and artist

“[My favorite thing about fashion is] its capacity to transform. For instance, moldy ducklings into randy swans, and vice versa.” Fatima Al Qadiri

Fatima was born in Senegal and grew up in Kuwait. Her adolescence in the early ’90s was right after the first Gulf War and during a very conservative time where she and her sister were in the house and had nothing else to do but draw and make music. “My entire adolescence was like an internal existence, because we couldn’t go out. I can count on both hands the amount of times I went out alone, it was really hardcore.” Fatima remembers reading a lot of avant garde magazines like I.D. and The Face, and attributes some of that exposure to her present interest in fashion. A minimalist in every sense of the word, from her understated and modest demeanor to her chicer than chic short haircut, those insular days seems to have contributed to creating a thoroughbred of taste. The feeling of always being an outsider in her home country has worked for her style-wise. Fatima has one of the best-kept secrets around – she is able to uncover some of the most state-of-the-art designer pieces in her hometown of Kuwait for 90% off because they are underappreciated there. Thus her couture Yohji Yamamoto skirt for $20, that someone stopped her on the street about, alerting her to the that fact that there were only 10 to 15 ever made. I love her sense of the impact that the subtleties make, like buttoning her shirt all the way up, not wearing jewelry, and her appreciation of the ultimate WilliWear trench (she is a first on SLU to have something from this design icon). Fatima achieves in her dress, in my opinion, the perfection of balance between feminine and masculine and thus is an emblem of our times in her dashing androgyny. I can’t help but see the comparison of how equally iconic her youth was as a teenager, locked indoors in a Middle Eastern war-torn country.

To learn more about Fatima, go to the captions on the detailed page.

If you like Fatima, you might also enjoy Malcolm Harris, Adia Tischler, Lux Leekley,
or Erik Bergrin.

Jessica Repetto

occupation: illustrator, art director, and designer

“I feel like everyday, [my passion for fashion and art] grows more…It becomes something I can’t live without. It becomes this crazy emotional release or this crazy emotional need.” Jessica Repetto

Jessica gets the chills and sometimes screams when she sees something that she has to own, like the orange and turquoise print fabric she wraps herself in and the colorful cartoon print “70s/Geisha” wedges that she wears with it. She opened the door when I came to interview her in a breathtaking, oversized African man’s cardigan that she wears as a dress, with lipstick red alligator wedges, possibly remnants of the period in her life when the color of passion took hold of her completely. True to the extraordinarily sensory way with which she experiences life, Jessica wore wore only red lipstick, red clothes and painted her room red, when she was writing her senior thesis on the color and its symbolism. I think that Jessica’s use of a blazer turned backwards and worn as a skirt is one of the most original twists on clothes that I have seen. And her bright colored patent sandals from the Milan flea market are very Marni-esque and used as a total surprise with her blue and white “tablecloth” skirt, gone Grecian when worn as a dress. She is obsessed with men’s clothes and tailoring and is launching a menswear line in the near future, which is interesting to me, because she herself is so unstrucutured and almost primal in her use of draping and textured fabrics. I was telling her how ultimately I would love to post SLU from tribal areas, where for me the style is kind of ultimate in its simplicity, emotional and inherited value. I felt that Jessica, with her heightened responses to life and creativity, was in a way already channeling that for me.

To get the full picture of Jessica’s talents, check out her website and blog.

If you like Jessica, you might also enjoy Adia Trischler, Lisa Moffie, or Hiraku Morilla.

Matt Parrotti

occupation: student and designer/creator of Funky Faction hats

“I like stuff when it’s fake. I get more of a kick out of it.” Matt Parrotti

Matt was elated when he was fired from a job last summer and ended up working at a day camp for kids. As warm-hearted and fun-loving as could be, Matt is a GIANT kid, in his wide-open spirit and endless ability to turn literally everything and anything into a creative experience and ultimately into a creation. Life is his stage and humor his vehicle, from dressing up like a tourist and walking through Soho as if he is one, to turning plastic toys into his signature necklaces. Everything is game for him to make art with, including tie-dying his tighty whities, doodling all over his card table, and tearing the garbage apart at his job at an old age home in order to find material for reappropriating his clothing and jewels. Matt’s attraction to “the ridiculous and obnoxious” is a refreshing antidote to the pretension and seriousness of fashion, and is in and of itself avante garde. Like a true artist, he doesn’t know where to stop when he starts working on something, and what comes out of it is absolutely brilliant, like his elaborately bedazzled, hand-painted and collaged baseball hats and sneakers, each one a masterpiece. But for me, Matt’s highest form of art and the reason for his ability to be so innovative is his boundless love and fascination with people and life and the absurdity of it all.

If you like Matt, you might also enjoy Zarzan, Ash Epps, Koos van den Akker, Ben Oprstu, or Athena Stuebe.