Wearing a vintage mustard colored poet's shirt on steroids with python pants and a pony hair Daryl K blazer (all of which has been inherited, found or borrowed), Leah is proof that it isn't money that you need to look explicitly you, but it is rather giving yourself permission to connect to your own feelings and thus your singular sartorial articulation. "It is all twisted," Leah states, regarding people who say they don't care about their style. People with a static relation to clothes in a way care the most, while those who allow themselves to be a little reckless are the less attached ones. Leah refers to her choices of clothing as an expression of her impulses, which in her case, compose a "volatile sense of identity." Her unfiltered cool aesthetic can be seen in how she wears her mom's McQueen pencil skirt (that she wore to Leah's 6th grade science fair) by wearing it with tights cut into over the knee socks, 70's uber wedges, a satin earth-toned shirt made by a friend and a salmon damask coat that she bought thrift, despite being flat broke.

To be electric and dynamic with your style is not sinful, but can be a vehicle for a more genuine connection to others. When Leah talks about needing to have the frayed Victorian jacket that she stole from the costume department of high school (the only thing she has ever stolen), I get it. Visual things can speak to our heart and soul as much, if not more than words and thoughts. An outfit can be your own poetry, language or painting, like the way Leah wears the turn of the century shredded Eduardian peice with a Gaultier men's kilt, an old agnès b. tee and pastel suede boots whose pilgrim look pre-dates the new, far more costly, and not quite as special Marc Jacobs Fall 2012 ones. There is a deep primal joy that we get from "frivolous" things, Leah claims, which in my opinion, negates its frivolity. "To be passionate doesn't not make you shallow, it's the denial that creates the insanity." Thank you Leah!