Good style often goes along with being ahead of one's time and thinking individually, and can be seen in historical icons on the level of a Joan of Arc, whom Eliza champions as someone who had such a modern point of view in her bravery and fashion statements. "The short cropped hair that no one else was doing at the time," and of course the capes and armor - Eliza has reinterpreted both aspects of the heroine's style with such accuracy that the similarity between the two is eerie. Her fanciful imagery with dressing doesn't stop there - "Where the Things Are" can be seen in her slipper fetish and the Russian folklore of Firebird in her embroidered dresses and feathered earrings. Eliza's eye for the ethereal led her to approach Sheena, her partner on The Uniform Project (the feature previous to this one) on the subway, because she was dressed like a "vintage elf." That meeting led to a genius "fashion meeting of the minds" that says everything about the future in their use of personal style to raise tens of thousands of dollars for Indian school children to have uniforms to go to school. Eliza is our first pregnant woman on SLU, and like her role models, stands out as a fearless innovator in the way that she is the architect of her life.

If you like Eliza, you might also enjoy Donna Harrison, Telfar Clemens, or Ellen Fisher.