Throughout her life, Elizabeth Brunner has been examining our collective perceptions of fashion. It’s been a process of learning and unlearning the ‘rules’ – a journey that’s been deeply personal. That journey began as a young girl, when she would watch as her mother sew her clothes. As Elizabeth watched her mom carefully cut and measure patterns and fabric, she would collect and use the scraps to wrap around her Barbie dolls. After studying fashion design at California College of the Arts, Elizabeth found herself at odds with the waste of fashion industry standards. She decided to launch her own clothing line, Piece x Piece, a pioneering line of one-of-a-kind, high-end pieces that reused discarded sample swatches from larger fashion houses.

It wasn’t until a few years later that she met her ultimate style muses: Her own boy-girl twins. Watching them dress themselves, she was in awe of the way they joyfully broke all the ‘rules’ of gendered clothing, blending their wardrobes together with a sense of style that could only be described as ‘free-for-all’. Her daughter felt most comfortable digging around in the dirt in her dinosaur shorts while her son was the image of pure joy twirling around in dresses. It was the ultimate unlearning of the rules we’re all taught about gendered fashion at a young age. The lesson felt deeply personal, and Elizabeth knew there was another way.

She launched StereoType as a way to share this joyful, blended vision of kids’ clothing and to advocate for self expression of all humans, especially the small ones. By breaking fashion rules, disregarding the boundaries we put around what boys and girls should wear, we encourage a more playful, creative, expressive sense of self for everyone.