When Heather feels like what she’s wearing on the outside mirrors how she feels on the inside she is at her best. Like the notes in the songs she writes, her clothes hold so much imagination that they are like individual characters, each with lives of their own. A merciless wardrobe editor, the discards are like people that she feels she has no idea how she become such good friends with, or how they ended up in her life (and closet). They get dumped. Frequently. This is not the case with her 1940s “Honeymoon suit” that she had to have, whether she was going on a honeymoon or not. Wearing the fitted, cropped jacket with jeans and a better-than-classic pair of ankle boots, Heather confides she feels bad for people who can’t find that kind of joy in their clothes.

Her Dad’s impeccable taste rubbed off on Heather when she was just a kid and in what she calls her “I Am Orphan Annie” daydream. His insistence that she learn a Beatles song once a week every week taught her how to compose pop music and paid her rent in his house and figuring out what she wanted to do. Her dad traveled the world with his rock band, bringing back kimonos, Dries, and Yohji. In better-than-Westwood sturdy, strappy two-toned boots that the cobbler wore, a floor-length Victorian skirt and vintage Tahari striped shirt, Heather is in her “day off from the circus” look, though being a 4th generation musician is far from the hard knock life she led as a kid, “hanging” out with Annie. “When I was twenty, I just started writing songs. It just started coming out of me, really easily, and it felt right. I was just, like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do.”

If you love Heather, you may also like Elizabeth Spiridakis, Kaelen Haworth and Alia Penner.

At twelve, Brian was hanging out in Cincinnati with giants, men that had shared a stage with legends like Count Basie, like the drummer Jon Von Ohlen and veteran pianist Ed Moss. “I was always around music– I picked up the trumpet at nine years old,” he says, “Because I thought it would be easy. It only had three buttons.” By the time he was fourteen he was making his debut in the Cleveland jazz scene, playing for packed clubs. For Brian, timelessness is everything– Cole Porter, George Gerswhin and the Great American Songbook never age. Neither does the Rat Pack swagger of Frank Sinatra. “Either you’ll see me in jeans and a t-shirt, or a suit… classic man stuff,” Brian says, behind his cool-as-ice black shades. His left arm is a sleeve full of traditional, old-school tattoos; “Sailor Jerry-like,” he says. The most prominent tattoo was also his first, modeled on a lion-head ring with diamond eyes given to him by his father which he wears on his pinky, like one of his mentors might have. In a charcoal handmade pinstripe suit from Against Nature and Swank cufflinks pulled right from the 50s, like his love of storytelling through music, the elegance of the “old guys” lives on in Brian. “On stage,” Brian reflects, “you lose sense of what time it is and what era it is.”

If you love Brian, you may also like Michael Arenella, Dandy Wellington and Justin Dean Thomas.

The reappropriating of divergent vintage clothing that Jean does with ease – like the Nantucket picnic basket bag he wears around his neck over a polka dot button-down with an ebony and gold medallion necklace, couture tribal jeans, Nike sneakers and an handmade American Indian wooden pouch with feathers slung around his torso – speaks to his refusal to cop to the usual divisions between people. He is the leader of an artistic collective in his hometown called the “Jersey Klan” aka “NJ Street Klan,” that was inspired in part by a collaborative called A.L.I.E.N NYC, which stands for A Legion In Every Nation, and expresses themselves so freely with music and style that Jean vividly recalls their exciting intermingling of streetwear like ninja pants and shoes meets skater punk. The Jersey Klan is a collective that promotes artists of all kinds, from concerts to art exhibits. Jean is an artist himself who raps and writes his own music, but the coordinating of his events is driven by a passion to give a platform to others, espcially young kids who would otherwise not have a chance to be exposed to the public.

The attendance at NJ Street Klan affairs are as diverse a tapestry as Jean’s genres of dress. He laces his Air Classic Kicks with zebra laces, mixes a camouflage top with a multicolored patchwork jacket and a Davy Crockett hat, and wears a Hawaiin print shirt with DIY studded Eskimo boots. “Punks, college kids, street kids…come together for the music… if you’re white, black, Asian, whatever color you are, it’s for everybody. It’s not about where you’re from and what race you are, it’s about the music, the culture, the word, the energy, the vibe.” He is so intense about the ability to express oneself though music that he produced a project called “No Faces,” that is a freestyle mix without any visuals in an effort to promote the importance of pure music, free of the pervasive hype of celebrity and “faces” over substance. Of his music and “No Faces,” Jean says, “You don’t have to know who I am… listen to my words… it doesn’t have a color…it’s something that I love to do…we are surrounded by too many people who just want to be celebrities and not leaders.”

If you love Jean, you may also like Matt Parrotti, Erica Yarbrough and Ian Bradley.

Experiencing a place like Cuba at an impressionable age left Gabriel indelibly instilled with the idea that you don’t need a lot to be happy and even when you are told that you can’t be yourself, you can still find a way. He recently quit modeling after one of his first jobs with Bruce Weber for French Vogue because he couldn’t deal with other people trying to dress him. Gabriel is very particular about going for the real McCoy when it comes to his uniform of cowboy boots, vintage bandanas, wife beaters and Levi’s, all of which reflect his zeal for engaging authentically in this world. Once back in his Washington state hometown after living at sea, while most others during pre-adolescence were “finding” themselves on Facebook (he still doesn’t have one), Gabriel started taking part in Native American ceremonies like sweat lodges (which is about going back into the womb, cleansing yourself and being reborn), pipe smoking and pow wows. At twelve, Gabriel was adopted by ceremony into the Omaha tribe through the Making of Relatives, where, if you love someone as family and they love you as family, you can publicly name them as such. Essentially, Gabriel has the good fortune of having acquired another set of parents of Native American descent, whose crests are tattooed prominently on his left ankle, along with the moon and stars of his adopted deer clan and a wolf for his wolf family.

The UT tattoo on Gabriel’s left forearm stands for urban tribe and commemorates a portion of Gabriel’s adolescence in which he was involved with putting on hip hop shows, rapping and playing with GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, Hieroglyphics, AC Alone and Abstract Rude. Fast forward to Gabriel’s time spent in New York City, and possibly the definitive kinship for him to date is that of his band Dog Soldier Society, which was formed when he was part of Collective Hardware, an artist colony on The Bowery. The band’s first song, “Fire on the Bowery,” which was not about a physical fire but the passion and dedication to making something outstanding and beautiful, eerily foretold the burning down of The Collective and all of Gabriel’s belongings along with it. He was left homeless once again with just the clothes on his back, including all of his traditional pow wow dancer regalia, eagle feathers, hooves, a bustle, a staff, a wing fan and art.

The actual Dog Soldiers are a Cheyenne warrior society that went into battle with a sash of rope tied around their waist and three arrows, which are tattooed on Gabriel’s right forearm. They’d pin the rope into the ground and when the battle started they could only fight as far as the rope would let them go, like a dog tied to a leash. The symbolism of the ritual was that there was no surrender, simply victory or death. You weren’t able to retreat and that was your chunk of land. “That’s the way we try to live with this band – no retreat, no surrender, victory or death,” Gabriel says. “I prefer to make my connections with a smile and a handshake and a hug or through my music.” Of his new leather jacket, Gabriel explains that he bought it along with a whole new vintage wardrobe so that he could hold his new nephew, Ira Joaquin Friedman, whose birthday – the eighth of the third month, in the eleventh year – is represented in a tattoo in honor of his bloodline: “He’s the first of the new generation.”

If you love Gabriel, you may also like Chris Ford, Ludget Delcy and Naomi Melati Bishop.

Annakim grew up traveling and, as a result, does not consider herself part of one world. To her, every person is so unique and connected at the same time that whether you’re part of a cult, in a family or married, there is the potential to have a twin or soulmate in any part of the world, no matter their seeming disparaties. As she puts it, “You can take people that are in diifferent places in the world, [who] have never met, and have a collective that could be so similar that it’s terrifying, yet their experiences are completely distinct from the people around them.” Dressing up every day is a meaningful ritual for Annakim, even if she is just an ornament in her own house. “Music is like liquid, and I feel like clothing should be more like music. It’s like a song that you love. It shouldn’t be about something that’s trying to fit in or out of the world. It should be something that’s bringing people closer to the world… it’s one of those things where it makes me not take life so seriously. I feel like clothing should be the opposite of anxiety.” We live in a society that is very addictive, she continues, “I feel like the only way I can really relate to people is to get past all of the labels. Is this person college-educated or not, sober or not, do they know fashion or not?” Instead, Annakim concerns herself with figuring out why we’re illuminated here when people are being bombed all over the world. “Every person has earned the right by being born onto this planet to be a part of it. So if you can start from that cave level, then I can hold a conversation with somebody,” she says, “We’ve all come from a whole place of viewing people on a level that has always been deeper than our current surroundings.”

Annakim has a room dedicated to her closet, filled with clothes and beautiful things that reveal her passionate world. Passion itself is her inspiration. Her friends’ closets make her heart skip a beat and she is fascinated by how people view their strengths and their weaknesses in their sartorial armor, as well as the memories that their belongings conjure up. She pulled out a printed multi-colored Alexander McQueen dress from the bottom of a mound of eclectically patterned fabrics, not because it’s a known brand, but in an effort to explain her zeal for rainbows. The colorful rainbow apparition is fascinatingly vivid, but also a manifestation of storm clouds and clashes. Annakim explains that from one’s macabre side comes rebirth: “It’s like Day of the Dead or one of these festivals where they celebrate that actual death brings on this huge rainbow of rebirth. The looping reminds me that I can’t take myself too seriously or the world too seriously…I can’t be afraid of change.” Similarly, her cobweb dress reminds her of all the things that she loves about living in Los Angeles and the insane pieces that you know had to have belonged to somebody that you would have loved to hang out with, but you’re never going to meet. “So it’s not vintage in the sense of like retrolicious, it’s vintage in the sense that I feel like it’s reborn.”

Whether in her rastafarian vampire cape and an astounding pair of psychedelic glam ’70s boots, both made by the artist Summer Harrison, or her Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs bedsheet dress with a butterfly necklace that has the gravitas of something science-fi and delicate simultaneously, Annakim has been both lauded for her “outlandish” dress and denounced for her androgyny. What she takes from these various assumptions is the craziness of it all – there’s an entire society of women who aren’t allowed to show their faces without incurring violence, yet people choose to discuss her clothing choices. For Annakim, androgyny is not about driving a wedge between people, but rather about shedding light on duality and bringing people together. Vaguely resembling Ziggy Stardust in both her handsome and fragile beauty with sparkles scattered across her face, Annakim sees the turmoil of Bowie’s fantastically beautiful character as a beacon of hope for humanity, calling people to attempt to understand those that might seem falsely foreign to us. Annakim is interested in a certain detachment that stems from beauty – to her, it’s more than just lighting and retouching.

Annakim feels that hatred comes from the same place as love, just as a treasured, cheerful hot pink ’80s Betsey Johnson gun-print dress makes you consider the fact that we live in a gun-permissive country. Furthermore, darkness and humor are not negative energy for her. She adores Rodarte’s blood dresses for their politically incorrect and intricately classical yet futuristic beauty. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was given to Annakim as a child, and she’s adapted the story as a template for her life. “People are always trying to go by this very rational harsh thinking, but it’s so detached and it’s not pragmatic eventually. It doesn’t ever lead to the circumstances that we’re seeing next.” So open your eyes and put on an embroidered ’20s tulle dress with Grecian Prada sandals, like Annakim does to get coffee and join in on her rant, or what she refers to as her creepy automatic poetry. “Aaaahh, to be a kid again and honor everything as a verb,” Annakim says. “Keep moving like a shark so that you won’t get eaten, you can actually make what you want in the world… we are jaded to think there is nothing original anymore… there’s so much that hasn’t been done, and that doesn’t mean regret, that just means you can start anywhere.”

If you love Annakim, you may also like Mary Lee, Natalie Gibson and Kay Goldberg.

Next to his grandmother, music is Elijah’s love. His signature high top hairdo is influenced by the hip hop duo Kid-N-Play and his passion for basketball attire reflects the style of R&B trio Bell Biv DeVoe, along with a devout respect for Michael Jordan, reflected in the legend’s jersey that he wears with a Chicago Bulls jacket. People like Slick Rick – for his storytelling about adventures and chance encounters alike and Bruno Mars – for writing about whatever comes to his mind, like the song Talking to the Moon – have given Elijah license to emote freely, but none more than Tupac Shakur’s book “The Rose that Grew from Concrete,” which motivated Elijah to write poetry. “There’s a line that is my favorite: ‘If our love is really true, I would gladly die and watch over you.’” When asked about his favorite places to travel, Elijah said sitting under the Brooklyn Bridge and writing his spoken word rhymes.

Kid Love is the name of Elijah’s alter ego which hangs from his chunky gold rope chain necklace. Elijah says his friends gave him the moniker in homage to the status symbol of the rappers of the late ’80s and early ’90s. However, he feels that “Kid Love” stands more for his young, yet mature demeanor. “I’m all over funny and outgoing. I don’t say no, like if everybody said: ‘Oh let’s go skydiving,’ I’d be like, “I’m going to jump first…[I'm] the outgoing one, the dancer, the funny guy, everybody’s friend…” His favorite person on StyleLikeU is Liz Baca not only for her ’80s schoolteacher style, but for her old soul spirit: “I get told that [I am an old soul] everyday because people don’t understand dressing is not just style. To me, it’s who I am.”

If you love Elijah, you may also like Matt Parrotti, Hiroto and Quinn Aston.

Larkin has made six official albums and it wasn’t until she turned twenty-one that she realized that putting on more lipstick might sell more of them. Her mom was determined to have her daughter focused on her accomplishments rather than being beautiful by making sure that no one on the commune complimented Larkin on her looks. This was in part her manifestation of a rebellion against the fashion industry’s effects on Larkin’s grandmother, who was a model and suffered from a lifetime of bad eating habits which eventually killed her. It wasn’t until the age of ten that Larkin had a notion of what being pretty was, which gave her the indescribable gift of being confident in her thoughts and opinions and unconcerned with the prospect of growing old and nobody finding her attractive anymore. “People were always complimenting me on being outwardly creative…[my mom] was teaching me how to sew and how to paint and fix things, and there was always this idea that if we want something, first we’re gonna try to make it.” Instead of spending money on a wedding dress, Larkin bought a sewing machine and made one herself for the first time out of a bunch of older wedding and lace dresses and feathers. The result wasn’t something hippy dippy, but instead a sculptural, three-dimensional couture creation that lends her more of a regal air than a Stepford wife in wedding white.

Endlessly multidimensional, Larkin is as much a sweet country girl in her floral dress with a hyper crinoline, as she is a slick and dark sophisticate in a coat she made out of Persian upholstery fabric. She plays psychedelic folk music and travels all around the world singing about “morbid and grim things” that are “definitely influenced by the Grimm fairy tales which my mother read to me all the time because she was so proud that my father was somehow distantly related to the Grimm brothers. Children fairy tales are so dark and I always wanted to make music that was kind of like that, that children would love and people would find beautiful but just below the surface, there’s all of the strange and dark things that are very real in human life.” Whether in haunting wings on a lace-up corset dress or earthy and authentic Cherokee moccasins, she is as omnipotent on the stage as she is in life with what she refers to as her freak sensibility. When studying sculpture at her alma mater, Larkin discovered her inner musical artist by turning her art exhibits into performances in an effort to exaggerate what she felt was her misfit status there. “Some people are just never satisfied [with the status quo] and I think a lot of those times, those people become artists,” Larkin keenly points out.

If you love Larkin, you may also like Oliver and Kira, Joanne Petit-Frere, Sielian Lie and Guillaume Boulez.

The romantic influences of Justin’s past are poignant – the way his white creeper/oxfords resemble the ones Joe Strummer wore and his skull ring is cast from the same mold as Keith Richards’. Justin’s aunt, Barbara, babysat for Jack Kerouac and he remembers a picture of her, smoking in a pencil skirt with the legendary author in front of a ’49 Studebaker. Justin read “On The Road” at thirteen, which prompted him to hitchhike all over the country later in life and echoes his childhood, growing up with “vagabond” parents who moved around a lot. His father was a drummer for Island Records and met his mother, a former model, when he picked her up while driving a taxi. Justin’s mother turned him on to records, including Paul Revere and The Raiders, Pet Sounds and The Monkeys, which prompted him to start playing music at ten years old. To this day, Justin is obsessed with studying the roots of music, like how the Stones were into Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and all of the Delta Blues musicians. In deference to his mentors, Justin got into poetry through songwriting when he read that Dylan said, “If you ever wanted to be a great songwriter you have to study the greats.” He has now read lots of the classics, including Tennyson and Yeats. Lord Byron is one of his new favorites, of whom Justin poetically says wasn’t wearing any sensitive sweaters and crying in his Earl Grey, but “left this earth in a malestrom of women, hedonism and revolution.”

Lord Byron said, “Every day confirms my opinion of the superiority of the vicious life.” Accordingly, Justin describes his band, The Bowery Riots, as floor to floor rock and roll with a social consciousness, an appreciation of the past that strives to have the impact of a band like the Clash, who took a stand by painting a picture and not drawing hard lines. The romance for nostalgia is everywhere from his Levi’s jeans, original Rat Fink jacket and windowpane plaid pleated trousers with a foulard shirt to his longing for the time of session players when they all knew each other and it was a community. Justin has a photo of “The Million Dollar Quartet” -comprised of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lewis and Elvis – which he keeps as an example of the possibility of being in the studio with icons before they were icons. Referring to the internet, Justin says, “I don’t think there’s the same player aspect of knowing different musicians, like Paul Butterfield when he was back in Dylan’s band, or The Band who was playing with Ronnie Hawkins, they knew each other. Jimmy Page was a session player for so many different albums from The Kinks to The Who because Townshend couldn’t write his own solos, and so Page had to come in and play on the album for ‘My Generation.’”

The folklore surrounding musicians of yesteryear is missing for Justin. Gone is the time when they gave themselves their own names, dressed a certain way, projected certain things and created a world that had mystery. You bought into that world and it meant something to listen to the whole of the album to share in the obscure meanings, as opposed to the lost context that comes with the iPod. Justin feels that people used to take music more seriously, “look at the liner notes…see who wrote the song, when it was recorded. Now you’re just that band that got on the Twilight soundtrack.” Similarly, fashion for Justin is more about craftsmanship, like his interest in old cars and his collection of two-toned wingtips. In a Paul Smith watch plaid classic trench or a distressed leather jacket from the ’50s, Justin says, “It’s just a world I live in, everyone has one. Call it whatever you want.”

If you love Justin, you may also like Philip Crangi, Sibyl Buck and Ashton Michael.

This same bravery and sense of uninhibited fervor goes for everything Irina does. She turned her passion for beat poetry and rhythmic literature into songs with the help of Pete Doherty when she collaborated with the Libertines at fourteen years old and today, among many other projects, she is designing her own line of clothes based on what she feels is a need for the quintessential women’s three-piece suit and she is jamming on stage with Sean Lennon and others with her new endeavor, Operation Juliet. Irina refers to her successes as “improvising,” but her talent and honesty are real and never more apparent than in her iconic sense of style. Her dad, who sometimes still speaks in whispers, an affectation left over from his past, had a resounding impact on Irina when he told her to be herself because everyone else is already taken. When you see her sprawled on a daybed in a couture hippie dress, extraordinary sheepskin bohemian coat and legit Mongolian boots, you get what a tasteful, cultured and confident free-spirit she is.

On any given day, it could be 1885 or 1929 when it comes to Irina’s distinct visual expression. She is an avid reader of books with details so vivid that one can imagine themselves in them, like Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. The novel is about Paris in the ’30s and it’s as if Irina stepped out from the pages when she wears an embroidered princess coat and a long silk dress from the exact place and time of the legendary author’s book, paired with a turn of the century embroidered artist’s coat layered with a ’20s-inspired Chanel embellished headpiece. She is an amalgam of all of the characters in search of the perfect expression of their artistry in Woody Allen’s most recent film, Midnight in Paris. Irina has such a passion for the city of creativity and romance that she too walks around at night and writes at a bar on the top of Montmartre, where she listens to the stories of an old man who says that he is Ernest Hemingway. However, she would most likely be in the exquisitely beaded ’20s dress that she’d like to get married and buried in, but “hopefully not on the same day.”

Karl Lagerfeld’s excitement for the artists and muses of past centuries taught Irina most of what she knows about where to look for influence as a designer. But for me, Irina is of that stature herself with her eclectic doe-eyed androgyny. She not only wears a tie with a button-down shirt and glen plaid blazer à la Diane Keaton, but takes it to a level of hyper-diversity with jodphurs, a leather corset belt and a Greta Garbo-like hat. She rocks the masculinity of Katherine Hepburn in oversized Balenciaga palazzo pants, but with with the delicacy of a ’20s cloche hat and a checked vintage blazer. Following in the footsteps of her writer activist father and grandfather in an authentic military blazer over an Ossie Clarke dress, Irina thinks for herself. This is epitomized by her sense of outrage when someone criticized her in an article for not being afraid to wear the same thing twice: “the most ridiculous line ever written…I don’t know anybody who doesn’t wear the same thing twice.” When you have a soulful connection to everything in life, including your clothing, it’s not disposable.

If you love Irina, you may also like Emily Bartley, Elizabeth Burns and Oliver and Kira.

For some, being diagnosed with MS and suddenly becoming housebound for years might have prompted a bout of self-pity, but for Kevin, he only gained a positive wisdom in his acceptance of watching life go by a bit more slowly, a new beard that is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln – the Civil War is one of his favorite sartorial influences – and a renewed interest in making and performing music after a twenty-six year hiatus initiated by the dissolution of an independent record deal. With suspenders purposefully dropped down and not worn over his shoulders and a floral Western-inspired oxford shirt, Kevin has a deep affection for Americana that grew out of his mother’s career as a jazz pianist and his travels throughout the USA as a fashion director and stylist. In a three-piece wool suit with boots that he distressed himself, Kevin is masterful in his subtle yet powerful presence like his father, who he recalls always left the house “done,” down to the cufflinks and a Bulova watch that Kevin still wears.

If you love Kevin, you may also like Ronald Sosinski, Brett Banks, NC Shuva and Freddie Leiba.