There aren't many people who can pull off pairing a Jil Sander dress with a sock monkey. Stylist Jennifer Hitzges did just that, for the German magazine Amica - creating a lush mise-en-scene of girls in silk slips and bloomers pulling clothes and toys from a trunk in an attic. It's such attention to details, like the cupcakes iced with poinsettias to accessorize velvet party dresses for a Mademoiselle shoot, which makes the New York-based stylist unique. "I like to tell a little story," she says, listing cartoons and children's books as inspiration and the 42nd Street picture library as the place to find a sense of authenticity. "She prepares the story in a beautiful way," says fashion photographer Tiziano Magni.

The Buffalo, New York-born Hitzges studied advertising communications at FIT before taking a job with photo rep Giovanni Testino. She stayed there for three years before moving on to assist Anne Christensen, now the fashion director of the New York Times, Phyllis Posnick, executive fashion editor at Vogue, and Joe Zee, fashion director at W. Since hooking up with rep agency Jed Root Inc., Hitzges has styled for Helmut Newton and Magni, and with up and comers such as Andrew Hetherington and Frederick Reshew, for Rolling Stone, Vogue and *Surface, among others.

While she admires avant-garde work, Hitzges describes her own sensibility as more right-and-center. "I'm not the one who puts the shirt on backwards," she laughs. "There are people who can do that really well. But I'm just not that far out there."

by Michelle Golden