Part American Indian, Julius’ family history has the overtones of the romance and dramatic beauty that he lives for. A tidal wave in 1900 in Galveston, TX propelled his ancestors to the East coast. His big persona makes Lily Pulitzer pants debonair with a navy double breasted blazer and a white shirt unbuttoned so as to reveal a crystal choker. Radiating good energy, through the rocks he wears on his body and the plethora of authentic collectibles that he lives among, is a calling for Julius. His hyper-artistic sense of dressing is surreal, like an embroidered kimono with ivory bangles to the elbow and antique claws on his fingers. “There’s no bull shit with me,” Julius states. He even admits in this interview that he is a hundred and one years old.

If you love Julius, you may also like Natalie Gibson, Louise Ingalls Sturges and Patrick McDonald.

For Fritz and Christina there are no boundaries between life, style, and their zeal to help people heighten their own self-awareness. Life is their stage. Fritz’s criteria for an interesting outfit is whether or not it can be recognized while he is a blur running in it, often over the Williamsburg Bridge. This is why he never wears jeans. Instead, you might see him in his red “filmmaker’s” ensemble, or a gold jacket and unisex leggings — kind of signature for him, as is his mustache, the “international passport to being male,” Fritz says. Once, leaving a play in the metallic piece, a member of the audience was certain that Fritz had been in the cast. By making a “difference” in the world, he feels, maybe somebody will be a little more of themselves. “I think the interplay of our similarities and our differences can take us to a new place in terms of social progress and personal satisfaction.” Christina, in a vintage Pucci dress, toile Dr. Marten’s, torn stockings over crocheted ones, and a Victorian jacket worn backwards, explains that, for her, being “in style” can make you afraid to have fun with how you dress, not to mention what you miss when you get that feeling of finding an unexpected treasure.

When Fritz first met Christina, he put her in his phone as “Christina Punk”. It takes guts to add an exaggerated Mozart wig to a white lace dress while walking down the street, but going against the grain is what creates change; the truest definition of punk. It’s not just dressing up in leather and studs. Punk is what Fritz’s father was living when, as a Roman Catholic priest in New Zealand, he tried to introduce Planned Parenthood and suffered the consequences: getting excommunicated from the priesthood. And Christina’s sewing together a shirt out of his father’s old ones for Fritz is another form of punk; making a conscious and original choice, no matter how small, matters. In his new book, How To Live The Good Life, Fritz explains its main character, who is trying to make other people happy by making his own life happy; someone who is doing something a little bit beyond himself.

If you love Fritz & Christina, you may also like Max Vernon, Lizzie Brandt and Hannah & Landon.

Christian is known for designing stage costumes for Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, beginning with the deconstructed prom dresses she was making when first she started out as a designer. Their collaboration evolved and persists; Christian recalls a seminal moment for herself as an artist on the band’s tour for 2003′s Fever To Tell. Karen wore a colorful hand-made skeleton suit — “Kind of Day of the Dead,” Christian says — with lots of embroidery, a three-dimensional heart, and arteries. But what excited the designer most was the thirty feet of intestines that could be pulled out by the audience. Christian never stops creating. “I constantly think about it. I dream about it.” Everything in her apartment is silk-screened, from the pillows to her linens. 

Christian’s clean, slicked-back hair and classic red lips make her feel as though she can go a little further out on a limb with her clothing, and reveals the conscious detail with which she approaches everything. A white jumpsuit looks “Bohemian chic” with a burgundy scarf tied like an ascot, matching socks, and shoes covered in her abstract Sharpie patterns — and one of her own silk-screened, floor length skirts with a black tank, and a vintage necklace with bold, “unusual combination of colors.” But most poignant to me is how Christian’s sense of peace in creating manifests in how cool she makes a simple breton shirt from Lands’ End, Ralph Lauren pants and an Ann Taylor belt with her splash-of-paint-on-the-oxfords look.

If you love Christian, you may also like Susi Kenna, Jessica Repetto and Shail Upadhya.

A huge fan of the uniform (he has worn the same pair of pants, designed and refined by him over ten years, for the last four months), with an emphasis on fabric, Rogan primarily buys anything traditional Japanese because they are a culture of “makers.” They repair a piece of fabric or a garment until it becomes something new. Like his workwear kimono suggests, for him it is more about the love of textiles than strictly clothing. And the pants which Rogan feels no need to change for any occasion are a Western version of an Eastern pant, with the long rise and pockets in all of the right places for all of the right things, including his pocket knife for his time spent reductive landscaping. Growing up between the Midwest and Middle East has had its own aesthetic imprint.

As a designer at Loomstate and ROGAN NYC, he describes his aesthetic mantra as “soulful minimalism,” embodied in a button down shirt that is slowly shredding (my favorite kind!). He’s so driven to simplicity that even the t-shirt isn’t quite there– he makes them out of one piece of fabric wrapped around the body in order to cut the number of seams from two to one. Rogan considers his monk-like devotion to his aesthetic, right down to his side braid, a sharp contrast to an industry catering to men who are so beaten down by the commercial convention of fashion that they stick to either their “bling” or their five-pockets jeans like glue. Preacher-like in mostly black and clean lines, everyone’s trying to get control of one’s purchases, as opposed to just letting people be themselves, he states. It’s all commerce and little creativity. For Rogan, evolution and constant change are inspiration– for example, a set of carpets in his home were never quite “perfect” until they were faded by sunlight. “You want to control it, I try to control it, but you can’t. You just have to give in,” exactly the wabisabi-type approach to thinking that Rogan has to take while he is doing one of the things he loves most: surfing.

If you love Rogan, you may also like Preston Davis, James Gillespie and Nick Fouquet.

Like the combination of her floral chiffon shirt and denim cut-offs, Yara walks a straight line between masculine and feminine, never veering too much in one direction or another. She is covered up but revealing in a body-hugging but sporty Preen dress, and the leggings from her Spring collection are a a sophisticated riff on athletics. “There was a point of feminism where it was like acting like a man, dressing like a man — I think we’ve moved beyond that, to where it’s celebrating womanhood,” Yara says, which, for me, makes her, in a Zero + Maria Cornejo jumpsuit and vintage denim jacket the exact kind of comfortable-chic that might see her cast in Woody Allen’s Manhattan II and a mirror to her style icon Georgia O’Keeffe.

If you love Yara, you may also like Rachel Ballinger, Camille Rushanaedy and Kaelen Haworth.

Elisa’s French upbringing does not belie her love of perfume, breton stripes, and bags. She has one of Marc Jacobs’s bags from his first collection, a nautical Coach from the ’70s, and one from the legendary Roberta di Camerino. After working in Paris shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother, the designer Lolita Lempicka, Elisa came to New York seeking a change. “I wanted to see what my value was outside of my family,” she says, and crossed an ocean only to find herself in another family workplace, with Betsey Johnson. Of her two maternal mentors, she says, “They both know what they want– they have a style and they stick to it.” Just like them, Elisa finds a certain harmony in her life now that she too is a mother, and seldom strays from her distinctly understated and clean-as-ivory style in a cream ‘30s vintage dress and Marc Jacobs patent sandals.

If you love Elisa, you may also like Erin Bazos, Dalad Kambhu and Nana Taniwa.

For Vincent, his buffalo-printed fringe vest is a reminder of the American folklore he learned from matriarchal chieftain Lydia Mankiller. When there’s a storm, he recalls, the buffalo, instead of running away like every other animal, charges into it. So, when every job fell through for Suzanne after leaving life in the Panhandle, Vincent sold off an old guitar amp and they used the proceeds to buy all of the antique dresses they could and started their now-thriving business, Spanish Moss, named after the kind of moss that only grows on Southern oak trees. Together, they have traveled nearly every nook and cranny of America looking for the most extraordinary secondhand treasures, living their lit-inspired fantasies. Suzanne channels everyone from Lisa Bonet, in a cream-colored sweater worthy of the Cosby Show to a John Singer Sargent portrait in a burnt-out velvet shawl. Their honeymoon was a three-month cross country road trip through the Southern Literary Trail, which runs from Oklahoma to Austin to New Orleans to St. Augustine, making a stop in the house of F. Scott Fitzgerald. “It’s so 1920s… white lights hanging from old oak trees, Spanish moss, old cemeteries, the cobblestones… It’s beautiful,” Suzanne says. “You can’t not be inspired.”

The two are passionate about America, and travel its roads non-stop. With hands, fingers, and wrists wrapped in turquoise, Suzanne feels she has “homes in a million different places.” To her, a ten hour drive to a friend’s birthday is no object. They embody the definition of “free spirit” in their work ethos, trading a 9 to 5 job for the road, sleeping in their car and wishing they had a place to do laundry. Both grew up learning American history and culture close-up. She, on month-long road trips with her brother, grandmother and mom. Suzanne points out that her dad was a hippie in ‘75 who sold drugs out of a van, while her mom never smoked a cigarette, loved the Beatles and was very Christian. Vincent is from El Paso and it remains one of his favorite places. The son of a minister who is like a Protestant Indiana Jones, along with his mother, raised their kids while saving the world, everywhere from India, where they once lived out of Gandhi’s house to Panama, making stops in between in “the slums of everywhere.”

Now temporarily settled in Nashville, Vincent breathes the same air as some of his icons, like Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. He loves a badass hat with feathers and turquoise and gives a charm bracelet a mysterious edge like some of his favorite books– all while getting his graduate degree in English literature. He’s heading for a phD and dreams of spending the rest of his life as a professor, talking Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon “with my sweetie and some kids and two Great Danes, playing in an apocalyptic delta blues band, and always traveling.” While Suzanne, whose originality is obvious in her eclectic pile of rings and bracelets, mirrors the authentic inhabitants of the towns she once wanted to tell stories about as an iconographer (like Zora Neale Hurston). She now reappropriates her favorite eccentrics in the curation of the couple’s collection of old and new clothes. “It’s very much about art for us,” she feels.

If you love Suzanne & Vincent, you may also like Chase Cohl, Marcus Holmlund, Chris Ford and Brooke Candy.

A bout with chickenpox– life-threatening and cripplingly painful in adults– reminded her of the importance of living fully every day. In purple high-waisted trousers, a Peruvian-patterned jacket and a three dimensional, origami-inspired necklace of her own design, Fred feels that life is too short to waste wearing faux-distressed denim, “like everyone else on the Underground.” Fearing that we are heading back to being four-legged primates staring into our cell phones and computers instead of seeing each other, it would definitely be a loss to miss the heartwarming good energy of Fred in a turquoise raw silk dress that she sewed up the middle to make into wide pants or the shoulder decoration she cut out from a dress. “We have learned to stand up, but we’re going back to the old way, of not looking at each other,” Fred laments.

If you love Fred, you may also like Alia Penner, Annakim Violette and Sarah Sophie Flicker.

Growing up neither from “here nor there” during a time when xenophobia was high freed Rajive from life in the monoculture of suburban American life. That state of non-belonging instilled in him a voracious, life-long wanderlust and identification with Bardo, the Tibetan state of becoming between one thing and the next. Not one to stand in front of a monument and take a photo, when Rajive travels, he says, “I try to associate myself with the parts of that culture that I identify with… then, I create images to bring the experience back with me.” Everything from folkloric Tibetan boots, beaded vests, loafers, and Shetland sweaters fill his closet. He speaks Spanish, French, Hindi, Urdu, Thai, and a smattering of German, Khmer, Finnish, Vietnamese and Dzongkha, switching as easily between them as he fuses Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man with Shiva, the deity of destruction in one of his paintings. Rajive renders Western superheroes in the ancient Thai style of Khon mask-making, re-imagining the American demi-god Batman as a demon out of the Ramayana.

Putting well-known archetypes in a foreign context is Rajive’s way of re-inventing the status quo, which includes himself, teaching high school art in the New York City public schools in vintage army jackets covered with jewels, the newest Doc Martens or a Tibetan rosary made of human bones. In American blue jeans, crocodile-skin cowboy boys and a red silk shirt from Thailand, the kind you get on any street corner in Bangkok for 100 baht (about 4 dolllars), tattoos that recall everything from his mother’s Catholicism to Eastern ritual daggers, a silver Nepelese medallion with turquoise and coral as his go-to necklace and his grandfather’s signet engagement ring from 1939, Rajive is a potent reminder of the liberation that can be found in the space between cultures. “I wasn’t bound by anyone’s rules,” he concludes.

If you love Rajive, you may also like Virginie Sommet, RZA and Mitch Alfus.

It is refreshing to come across a designer who doesn’t trumpet about wearing a single brand from head-to-toe. Instead, she supports the re-inventing and evolution of a single piece over time, the same way her favorite books take her on a sprawling journey. The characters are what make the novel, she says, discussing her current favorite, the enduring East of Eden, just like character “makes” her outfits, with a vintage poncho thrown over a Zero + Maria Cornejo black tunic dress. Of the earthy and refined knits of her own design, especially the extra-long cardigan that she wears with an Equipment blouse, she says, “My sweaters are three dimensional and very solid, like my Canadian heritage.” The bookworm that she is, Kaelen comes home from the bar at 4 AM and reads. She believes that art made with thought and intelligence outlasts trends and passing fads. Kaelen says, “Trends matter, in the sense that they’re relevant currently. But it also matters that they stay relevant to whoever buys them.”

If you love Kaelen, you may also like Natalie Toren, Karen & Sara Brown and Lindsey Thornburg.