Style Like U

Freddie Leiba from Stylelikeu.com from Stylelikeu on Vimeo.

Occupation: Fashion Director and Connoisseur

Freddie is one of our reigning sages of understatement and elegance in dressing. His infinite experience traveling the world and in the fashion business as a Fashion Director and as one of the first stylists, where he worked with the most prominent of photographers, models, and publications (there must be 100 French Vogue covers to which he contributed), puts him in a league of his own as an arbiter of taste and vision.
Freddie’s resume is as deep as it is wide, and is highlighted in detail on our 2nd video of him - it is a journey through his seminal experiences in the industry. (Please see below). Among many things, he lived in London in the 60’s, where he saw the first miniskirt, and starved himself to buy the real YSL. In 1970, he moved to NYC, where he worked for Andy Warhol at the beginning of Interview Magazine. Having been surrounded season after season by a barrage of trends and change, Freddie knows what transcends time and how to weed out what’s common. He feels that it comes down to a uniform, where each piece is extraordinary and indispensable, down to the Maasai red Hermes jacket, the only red he approves of. Among the essentials are custom made suits, wing tips, and Levi’s, accented with embroidered vests, colorful button downs, ties, and pocket squares. The paints are there to make the painting, and it always works together in Freddie’s perfect balance. There is nothing average in his wardrobe, each piece is quintessential down to the cashmere socks, and the only time Freddie feels off and not himself is when he goes to the gym.
A few more fascinating facts on Freddie… he was born in Trinidad and was educated at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1990, he worked with the Morgan Hotel owner Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell of Studio 54 and architect Andrea Puttman to design the uniforms for some of the first boutique hotels: Royalton, the Hudson in New York, the Mondrian in LA, the Delano in Miami, Cliff in San Francisco, and Sanderson and St. Martin’s Lane in London. Freddie was made Creative Director of Harper’s Bazaar in the mid-1980’s, and was brought to Conde Nast by Anna Wintour and Alexander Leiberman in the 1990’s. In the late 1990’s, he moved to In Style. His favorite fashion moment was having dinner with Yves St. Laurent. Freddie would love to travel to Russia, one of the few places he hasn’t been.