Who

Best known as a judge on Bravo's Project Runway, Garcia is the former fashion director at Elle.

Backstory

Colombia native Garcia started college at Boston University before transferring to FIT, where she initially planned to pursue a career as a fashion designer. After realizing that the competition was fierce and the jobs scarce, she changed her major from design to fashion merchandising. After graduating, Garcia took a job in the PR department at Perry Ellis (back when Marc Jacobs was the label's creative director); she later moved to Mirabella as an assistant stylist and market editor. In 2000, Garcia was named fashion director at Elle.

Of note

Although she'd been known in the fashion biz for years, it wasn't until she landed on Project Runway alongside Tim Gunn, Heidi Klum, and Michael Kors that Garcia became a household name. Garcia quickly cashed in on her newfound quasi-celebrity: She published the requisite book in 2007, The Little Black Book of Style, which offered readers such incisive pearls of wisdom as "respect yourself, love yourself, and dress up for yourself and nobody else," and appeared in a series of ads for Blackberry. But Garcia's tenure as Elle's fashion director came to an end in 2008. Following months of tension with Joe Zee, the mag's new creative director, Garcia was elbowed out by editor-in-chief Robbie Myers in April. The separation wasn't total, though: Garcia needed to maintain her Elle affiliation to in order to return to Project Runway for its fifth season—and Elle hasn't exactly been hurt by all the free publicity—and so Garcia will remain at the mag as its editor-at-large until September 1st. After that, she'll begin working as the fashion director at the second-tier fashion title Marie Claire—a job that will guarantee she stays on Runway since Marie Claire is replacing Elle as the show's official magazine sponsor as part of its move from Bravo to Lifetime.

Personal

Garcia is married to David Conrod, a senior managing director at Guggenheim Capital. (That's the firm where Tinsley Mortimer's husband, Topper, works.) They had their first child, Lucas, in March 2007. They live at 45 East 66th Street, in the same building as Rudy Giuliani and Judi Nathan.

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