Comfortable in herself — tailored but not uptight — in an American Apparel tanktop and Opening Ceremony trousers, Wandie finds being alone, even while traveling, a luxury. Autonomy is a constant theme in her life. She produced an independent feature film in the past year that was inspired by the work of British director Mike Leigh and his method of creating characters and a story from the ground up. Wandie’s mom, a great source of strength for her, brought individual fruit cups made up of watermelon, kiwi, and pomegranate to everyone on the set on the first day of filming. Behind her oversized Karen Walker sunglasses and glamorous, very “LA” vintage sundress, Wandie feels that breaking down every day helps her when she’s under extreme stress. Either that, or a trip to Laguna Beach and one of her favorite shops– The African Hut.

If you love Wandie, you may also like Nadia, Sophie Assa and Wamuhu Waweru.

This morning I noticed a tweet that said something like, “We would never leave the celebrities naked on the red carpet,” and I winced at the idea that we have gotten to a point in our culture that they would be helpless dressing themselves and looking good. Cindy could walk down the red carpet in her Topshop white-crocheted shift and her favorite Saludo espadrilles and steal the show, let alone in her black hourglass dress with metallic ballet flats (and not an ounce of bling). Treasure what you have, she feels, and never caught up in what everybody has. That attitude makes you want everything she has on.

If you love Cindy, you may also like Tamara Lowe, Andrea Mary Marshall and Jesse Kamm.

The two in live in a way that is refreshingly traditional and yet distinctly modern, much like the quaint countryside to which they retreat from their urban lives. Preferring Dostoevsky and the spoken word to Facebook and Twitter, Hassan wears his Dad’s khakis with a unique touch; he rolls up the hem to fine-tune the proportion with a chambray shirt cut up into a vest worn over a t-shirt. Nadia is interested in esoterica; books like The Poetics of Space, films like Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra von Kant and taking photos with film as opposed to digital. She makes kitschy corduroy overalls with a Mickey Mouse belt and sweaters recovered from her childhood seem 21st century. Few can tuck socks into trousers with handmade brogues and possess both a serious stature while remaining hip like Hassan, or exude both a sultry and edgy glamour in a calf-length dirndl skirt with a chopped-off man’s shirt like Nadia.

If you love Nadia & Hassan, you may also like Tat Vateishvili, Freddie Leiba and Desiree Neman.

If you love Coury, you may also like Ashley Shaw, Lizzie Brandt and Marina Munoz.

It’s always the ones who say they don’t want to pretend to be original who are. Margaux is part of the generation who grew up on Sex and the City and an obsession with Louboutins, but she feels of the status symbol shoes, “Je ne pas de tu.” Instead of kitschy plastic or diamond jewelry, she has a wrist of earthy gemstone bracelets and wears a long t-shirt dress with army boots or a hoodie and jeans with the effortless, edgy quality of a Stones girl. Adverse to “Upper East Side” culture, the aesthetics of a Jim Jarmusch film and the iconic lifestyle of the West Coast skateboarding community, chronicled in Lords of Dogtown, are more Margaux’s speed. Growing up with a rock n’ roll Mom and an art dealer Dad, pushing boundaries is in her comfort zone. Margaux is turning her renegade voice towards making music of her own, and she hopes to travel and see “everything in this world… I am always unsatisfied, I always want things bigger, bigger, bigger. It’s not good,” Margaux excitedly laments.

If you love Margaux, you may also like Krystal Simpson, Annakim Violette and Kenyon Phillips.

Matthew grew up in Cyprus, where he struggled with how conservative it was in terms of “sexual orientation, religion, fashion, work .. everything in Cyprus gives you identity. There are many boxes.” If he wore anything there like what that he wears in London, a city that has deemed him one of its best-dressed, he would be on the first page of the Cyprus newspaper – as a freak. And, despite the fact that he wears things like his Marios Alexander white shirt with bells, on him it is very toned down with Brick Lane vintage wing tips and jeans. Like the never-ending tension between the Greeks and the Turks, the hypocrisy and exclusivity is insidious. They say, ‘Love your brother, love your enemy as a brother. The weekend after, they’re praying for the soldiers to go and fight.” The morning Matthew was discharged from the army he got himself on the first plane to London.

In London, Matthew feels happily removed from the warring nationalities that he grew up with and that could never connect to each other. Instead, he revels in how the many nationalities, religions, backgrounds and mentalities thrive together. In the city that has accepted him, Matthew is able to help the plight of the new crop of fashion underdogs who you would never see if you opened up a magazine, only Versace and Dior. “At the end of the day,” he says, “I’m going to bed with a smile on my face. It doesn’t matter if I can’t pay my rent next month.”

The tattoo on Matthew’s arm reads, “Quis custodiet ipso custodes?”, a Latin saying meaning “Who will guard the guardsmen,” he explains. He had it done just before entering the army. It is every bit as apt, Matthew thinks, for journalists as it is for soldiers. “We are watching out for all these people. Who will watch us? … You can have a Parisian nose and a front-row seat, a Hermes bag and massive Louboutins,” he says, “But an attitude will always make you ugly. We don’t need attitude in fashion.”

If you love Matthew, you may also like Houman Farahmand, Galia Loupan and Miranda Levitt.

Emanating an edgy sophistication in a resin coated canvas “leather” jacket and a bow tie, a tribute to traditional gentlemanly rituals and Pee Wee Herman, Joshua feels, “The problem with fashion is that it’s not just about your own person, it’s about putting out a message and that’s where it gets complicated.” Often asked when speaking to design students at Parsons why the icon of the villain is so celebrated in the fashion world, he says, “Because it’s the easiest path to power. If you’re going to be a hero, you have to have purpose and knowledge, and that takes work. To be a villain, you don’t have to have any knowledge. You can be nuts, and still have power.” A Burberry ad featuring a model wearing a spiked leather biker jacket, Joshua points out, is hypocritical. “They’re taking on this rebel iconography. It’s sort of the rebel without a cause thing.” Even wearing vintage can promote the wrong message when it looks hip. In reaction to this empty posturing, he is involved with The Pinnacle, an initiative of fashion industry professionals who are trying to reinvigorate the discussion about fur and this idea of being a real rebel. “The wild animals who spend their entire lives in tiny cages, goes against everything they have evolved to do,” Joshua says. “A wild animal is evolved to explore a vast amount of area and space. You can see they go crazy. They pace in the cages. They spin in circles, they resort to cannibalism, often. They literally go insane. And it isn’t so much the death that’s the problem, it’s that life of psychological torture.”

Joshua describes his adolescence in Poughkeepsie, New York, as torturous. The descriptions of his sculptures seem to echo the sentiments of his youth, “In our relationships with each other and the natural world, we decompose both literally and figuratively from our living conditions. We are products of our own creation.” Dressed in JNCO in jeans, he found refuge in poetry, comic books and punk music at local club The Chance, Joshua says that he was searching to determine that he wasn’t doomed and also that the things that concerned him concerned others, as well. Revenge for Joshua comes not only in the form of animal rights, but exposing the “assholes” who label and marginalize gay men as the ones who need an identity check. “I feel like male identity in our culture is powerful but also incredibly limited and stifled…if you’re a man and express any identity outside of the four Bs of mainstream manhood, which is boobs, ball, beer, and beef… you are considered less of a man.” On his blog, The Discerning Brute, Joshua explores the idea of male identity in relation to sustainability. “I see mainstream male identity as a roadblock to sustainability because compassion is seen as a weakness for men and if you express compassion, whether it’s towards an animal or another person or an ecosystem…it’s a red flag and you’re less of a man.” Far from the days when he identified with dorky Dawn Weiner from “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” no one would mess with Joshua these days, his arms full of tattoos of everything from germinating seeds (the symbol for awareness), to insects with halos (representing their sacredness, as they support all of our lives) and hundreds of species of extinct birds.

“[Style is] the most powerful form of personal identity that you can express, and it’s unspoken. If you know who you are and you know how to express that through the way you look… that says more about yourself than you could explain with words,” Joshua believes. His inked- arm candy with a message mimics the intensity of Joshua’s ’70s patterned Marc Jacobs pants. He wears them with vegan John Fluevog shoes and an Alter vest made from a restructured suit with an organic cotton American Apparel tee underneath. (The conventional cotton industry in Uzbekistan, the cotton-producing capital of the world, is like Chernobyl he revealed – children there are being born with no limbs because of the excessive amounts of pesticides on the crops.) However, after witnessing disciples of the four B’s in droves at a recent U2 concert at Giants Stadium, I’m not sure if Joshua’s theory that men will be able to expose their legs in short shorts like women do without ridicule – a notion that has come from his newfound love for pulling his socks up over his pants – is going to catch on anytime soon.

If you love Joshua, you may also like Dylan Treleven, Freddie Leiba and Max Vernon.

Ruining the flirtiness of a chiffon pleated skirt with studded Converses and a tuxedo jacket, complementing a “man-getter” evening gown with an army jacket and a fur vest or wearing body-revealing red skinny jeans with a leather shirt over a button-down shirt and under a chambray shirt are among Leandra’s tricks for repelling that guy that objectifies women: “My blog is a process of elimination. It helps you weed out the bad ones.” Leandra comes from “a rare breed” of authentic dressers, including her Turkish grandmother, whose closet is Leandra’s favorite vintage shop. Two of her favorite heirlooms from her grandmother are an ostrich skin Hermes clutch and green vintage Chanel bag that Leandra will be passing down to her own children and will not be wearing with a plain t-shirt dress, at least not without her brother’s cardigan or maybe her most prized mustache necklace, which she wears on her face.

If you love Leandra, you may also like Sabrina Diaz, Kristen Lee and Preetma Singh.

Originally from Austin, Kelly attributes some of her fearlessness with style to the eccentrics in Texas, where the customary rules of the fashion establishment don’t apply. The women she is referring to are not afraid of big jewelry and one of her favorite things to do is take long drives on country roads to the places where ranchers’ wives have sales. Passionate about adornment, Kelly designs and sells her own jewelry and won’t leave the house without at least two pieces on, even to get the mail. She wore two extraordinary pieces – with an ageless vintage Geoffrey Beene dress from Feathers, her favorite store in Austin – made with ribbons, stones, plastic chains and rhinestones during her shoot. The necklace that I covet most is one that she will unfortunately not sell, made from a large antique Moroccan buckle that Kelley added lots of trinkets to. The massive bauble that she made from Christmas tree ornaments is a clever alternative to the Dries Van Noten one that inspired hers.

It was a revelation to Kelly that wearing something interesting can make your life more interesting. The discovery has shaped her life ever since, boosting her confidence and empowering her to open herself up to conversations with people everywhere, a big change after wearing school uniforms all her life when she was more focused on painting and interior design. Her love for interiors is unmistakable in her closet, which is organized by color and types as if she were planning rooms in a house. Her closet resembles the hundreds of shades of off-white candles around her home. Ivory jackets are followed by ivory trenches, khaki trenches and then “it goes into leopard,” all so that her favorite mixing and matching of patterns can happen systematically, like when she wears the jacket that she would take if her house was burning down, an awning-like gold and black striped one from Beacon’s Closet with sleeves that she embellished herself, worn with her signature blend of polka dot shirt and leopard print skirt.

The other item Kelly couldn’t live without is a navy blazer from a little boy’s suit that she bought for twenty dollars. She feels it ties everything together and it’s the final touch to Miu Miu’s tulip bell bottoms, tailored with a hint of ’70s surprise, is an Erin Fetherston shirt with a painted bird print that reminds her of a Hunt Slonem painting, an Indian ring and her preferred pointy elf shoes that are vintage Helmut Lang.

I left Kelly thinking about how good slouchy silky pants look again. Even better, she buys them a couple of sizes too big – they’re her idea of a sweatpant – and wears them with her convertible jacket with an asymmetrical hem that zips off or on depending on the length she prefers and is from a friend’s company called Primary and heels. The same designers she consults with, Primary also makes the layered washed silk drapey dresses that Kelly demonstrated, tied into different shapes. In addition to an appreciation for Burrata and Humboldt Fog cheeses and papillons – her Bunny is unforgettable – keeping the candles lit while at home alone and the joy of discovering how each thing in your closet works with the other represents Kelly’s message, a refreshing change from the predictable this season’s must haves.

If you love Kelly, you may also like Karla Deras, Lori Goldstein and Mary Lee.

Life is seen through his own glamorous lens when he interprets the romantic, rather than dandy side of Paul Smith in a pastel blouse with a bow and the dark, rather than the humorous side of Henrik Vibskov in a military black jumpsuit. His torn Gareth Pugh sweater and Rick Owens skirt reveals his past punk life in Berlin, where he lived for five years and learned to not rush. There, he felt as if he could let all of his walls down. Paisley wore a tethered tee and jeans everyday while he “experienced breathing, looking up, and being an artist for no other reason than for the love of what you were doing,” creating mashups of punk rock and disco. This former Paisley would have felt his current sartorial passions – Malu fishscale pants, silver Patrick Cox boots and Sarah Samoiloff’s tribal foot-long silver earrings (to this day, one of my favorites on SLU) – to be too much armor for the city whose oppressive wall fell in ’89. It took two years in London after Berlin to prepare Paisley to re-enter New York City, but he has, and on his own terms, sipping tea for two hours in the afternoon with his cell phone off.

If you love Paisley Dalton, you may also like Paul Alexander, Guillaume Boulez and Lindsey Caldwell.