Revisit Pamela Love’s closet.

Not afraid to admit that she has a fear of flying, Jenne is steadfast in taking risks despite any anxiety and is confident that they have led her to greater successes. The mother of three under the age of five whose names – Roxy, Valentino and Bowie – are tattooed in beautiful script on her arm, has her own rapidly growing business where she consults with companies on trends and pop culture. Knowing what is next is her basic instinct and it has only failed her when she has listened to anyone but herself. She feels that Rick Pipino, the father of her children and a legendary hair dresser, truly loves women and has taught her to celebrate a lot of her individuality. “He’s not the kind of guy who wants you to have long hair.”

Hanging at home, where she loves to cook and nurture, Jenne makes the moment her own in a fake DIY Gucci sweatshirt, a fake dollar bill “Biggie Small” necklace and slouching vintage long johns with visible plaid boxers unapologetically sticking way out. Her kids are her priority, but what I love is how she doesn’t lose herself in the process. Her signature touches of punk, with safety pins in one ear, hip hop, with one large diamond stud on the other, gothic, with a cross tattooed on the back of her neck make a demure high waisted skirt, YSL stacked pumps, an Isabel Marant net top, thigh high stockings, studded cuffs and belt, a melange so eclectic that it crosses all classifications. Her signature touches of punk with safety pins in one ear, hip hop with one large diamond stud on the other, and gothic with a cross tattooed on the back of her neck make a demure high-waisted skirt, stacked YSL pumps, an Isabel Marant net top, thigh high stockings, studded cuffs and belt, an eclectic melange that defies all classifications, somewhere between Body Heat meets the Upper East Side. A double layer of tattered Victorian skirts with a leather jacket, her favorite vintage black fedora and distressed army boots are unmistakably personal to her and make Jenne as tough as she is feminine.

The teenager obsessed with Led Zeppelin and Cream who wanted to be Lady Miss Kier from Deee-lite when she came to NYC says that her life is driven by goals, but the ultimate one is to be a grandmother. No doubt Jenne will be looking like the baddest matriarch in the unusual combination of her vintage leather jacket with an English punk band’s name across the back and the chunkiest ikat print Julian Louis for Aldo wedges, when in actuality she is the most embracing.

If you love Jenne, you may also like Shae Detar, Rebecca Weinberg and Stephanie Niedospial.

Lindsay is dreamy in a ’70′s, French Lieutenant’s Woman on today’s LES kind of way in her burnt velvets and Susan Ciancolo (one of my favorites), hand made fairy-tale dress that is reminiscent of one of Lindsay’s most admired artists Andy Goldsworthy for it’s ode to authenticity. Both the designers and sculptor share a love for the woods and nature. It makes sense that from a young age, Lindsay remembers using fashion to set herself apart. “I never wanted it to be some sort of status quo or to fit in… everything I wear usually has to represent something or there’s a story behind it.” As far as shoes go, she is not a hoarder but buys about two expensive pairs a year and wears them forever. They mold to her feet and are a part of her like the seminal pirate Westwood’s that are the perfect complement to her romantic clothes and that she turned from white to black. From the fabrics she buys that are only from North America to what she wears, everything has a mission and vision behind it. She envisioned her lace tights underneath a black widow dress when she made them and one of her rings from Anna Sheffield of Bing Bang is an ID bracelet with the name of a friend that passed away. When it comes to Lindsay’s gowns, she conceives them to be worn from day to night and I love how she wears the delicate garments with vintage loafers.

It takes a courage and willingness to fight to turn your passion into reality, rise above the mundane and give birth to something special. Like the Incas and their building of a monument geared around the sun and the eclipses, to be extraordinary is work. “I would rather have a business that’s based on smaller quantity for higher end items where I am proud to have my name on every piece. They are like my babies, I love them,” Lindsay explains.

If you love Lindsey, you may also like Pamela Love, Liza Thorn and Dustin Hollywood.

I’m guessing that moderation is not in Kimi’s vocabulary. She plays the guitar, keyboards, and drums, sings and has a wrist of silver bracelets that climb up to her elbows. Just as making music is such a deep passion that she’s willing to be a starving artist, it’s not just about the façade of owning things for her, either. The rituals of putting on jewelry is as important as the sound it makes when she walks. Life in her Lindsay Thornburg hooded cloaks and her grandmother’s robes allows Kimi to disappear into her very much alive childhood obsessions with witches, warlocks and elves. In fact, Kimi feels that she is presently in her ultimate playing dress up phase. She wears a belt as a necklace, triple-X sweaters with elaborate lace tights and is so loyal, as Scorpios are, to her combat boots that she glues and tapes them together.

Kimi is all gypsy and not only in appearance. She was born and spent most of her childhood in a small village outside of Munich and moved to Colorado as a teenager. Though she is comfortable in long feather earrings, sheer Stevie Nicks-like caftans and being on the road touring with her band, she finds the constant of music in her life grounding. The fortresses Kimi built as a kid playing house in the “magical woodlands” of her youth are now altars of figurines and drapes that she brings with her while traveling, in an effort to feel at home. The Libra in her is “in the clouds” and has a tattoo from The Last Unicorn that says, “I am always dreaming, even when I am awake it is never finished.”

If you love Kimi, you may also like Marika Wilson, Pamela Love and Sarah McGovern.

Meli says that the airplane raised her, but in truth it was her teachers who have been her guides, including Pamela Lawton, who first took her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art at nine years old. Meli and Lawton have maintained their closeness throughout the years, so much so that she would call her mentor from the airport for moral support before embarking on journeys to Europe. These forays began with a high school exchange program, where the director of the art school in Vilafranca del Penedes liked her so much that he kept inviting her back. Meli ended up publishing a book there, a photographic documentary of the festivals, architecture and people of the town she was living in. Currently, Meli is creating a community of artists, like herself, in a loft in Brooklyn. She calls it home because it is a place that she can wake up and deal with her intense emotions and sleep in her wild dreams.

If you love Meli, you may also like Sarah Temple-Raston, Nick Fouquet and Emily Kareh.

If you like Sarah, you may also enjoy Pamela Love, Kelle Calco and Chase Cohl.

When I first saw Pamela at a fashion show with her stop-dead-in-my tracks tousled, earthy mane of hair, Peruvian-inspired poncho, mixed with some rock and roll black leather pants, I knew that I had to get up the nerve to do my SLU schpiel and get her for this site (and this was before I became aware of her looks-like-you-got-it-on-an-archeological-dig-in-Mexico jewelry – I wanted it all!). True to what I expected, when I came to do this interview, Pamela fueled my love for her kind of ’70s, natural, indigenous and eclectic style. Her clothes are unaffected perfection, whether in her vintage, floor-length Diane Freis hippie dress (I have been chasing after one for myself ever since) or in her Southwestern chunky cardigan and jeans. However, her curation of jewels, both ones that she has created and those she has picked up, is a virtual exhibit of her taste for authenticity and cultural mythology. Pamela’s fascination with archetypal, raw imagery permeates in her iconic claw bangles, raven skull necklaces, eagle talon earrings, and oversized crosses that she makes and equally, in everything she collects, from the geo ring she found at the airport to the Native American children’s arrow one. Pamela’s obsession with collecting does not end on her limbs – her apartment is an expose of her intense attraction to “curating.” (She says that when she was a child, she developed a compulsion to unite corresponding or like objects). Today, she lives amongst an explosion of fossils, crystals, afterlife iconography, and scientific and medical imagery (her dad was a surgeon) – it is an environment that reflects her originality and gives insight into the innerworkings of the mind of a creative virtuoso. Pamela’s jewelry resonates with a kind of shamanic thinking that drives her to spend the majority of her time “uncontrollably” making it. Each piece is a keeper, a collector’s item, it’s the kind that belongs to you.

If you like Pamela, you might also enjoy Chase Cohl, Liza Thorn, Erika von Petrin, Kristine Barilli, Carter Emmart, or J.D. Szalla.

I love how Naomi points out that we are all multifaceted prisms, and that we can choose to see the different sides of a person or reveal the different sides of ourselves – “more power to you” if you can show it all at once. To me, one’s willingness to expose their fragility is a sign of ultra-strength and depth, and Naomi wears her heart on her sleeve, or more literally, on her hand. Every finger has a ring with a story, and she never takes them off. Two are from her dad (a silver one from Ibiza that covers her nail and another that she has worn every day since she was eight, and has calloused her finger from doing so), one with purple crystals from her boyfriend, one that is a claw (representing the year of the tiger honoring her birth), a gold and turquoise YSL one, a Tibetian prayer ring, a silver bark one from her best friend, one from a trip to Santorini, one on each thumb, a gold and turquoise YSL one, and her most “precious” one of all, which is her mother’s, that she hides underneath another ring to shelter it.
Naomi’s mother was from Indonesia, a princess and a dancer, and her father, a transplanted New Yorker, whom after first seeing Naomi’s mother on the streets of Jacarta, waited for 31 days on top of a castle until he found her again. (He had always dreamt of marrying someone who looked like they were from a Gauguin painting.) Naomi, who similarly resembles a muse in one of the same post-impressionist paintings, admires much of what she refers to as the magic in the Muslim culture that was native to her maternal side of the family, like women dressing up in florals and wearing blossoms in their hair. And then, she clearly has the free spirit, very 1970s flair of her dad, with his ease of wearing women’s hats and blue eyeshadow if he felt in the mood. Naomi carries a leather fringe bag that he gave her around her neck, and wears his same eye makeup.
However, Naomi sees her love of beauty most embodied in her coveted Pamela Love dagger and petal earrings that she says encapsulate her – “the whole idea of dark and the mysterious and the terrifying, sometimes the macabre, and then the romantic, and the deep love of life and all of its experiences. I think that’s the two sides of all of us, or life in general.” (and knowing Pamela, I can attest that this is how she would hope whomever was wearing them would feel).

If you like Naomi, you might also enjoy Ziva Naumann and Tziporah Salamon.