Inside Illustration Fashion
Infinite interpretations – fashion illustration evolves: an excerpt
Fashion illustration embraces much more than depictions of this season’s designer collections. It can expand way beyond clothing into the realms of the fantastical and thought provoking.
In our Inside Illustration Fashion Season article, Zoë Taylor explores three varied approaches, speaking to the artists and curators who are reaching for a different perspective on what fashion illustration can be.
‘The industry has been transformed, as has the world, by e-commerce and social,’ said cultural historian Caroline Evans in spring 2023, when asked what had changed since the launch of her seminal book, Fashion at the Edge, 20 years ago. ‘This isn’t just about fashion design and sales but also about visual communication and new media, as we’ve collectively settled into life online. We now consume fashion as image as much as we experience it as material object, if not more so.
Innovations in digital marketing have hugely expanded the terrain of fashion illustration, opening up new possibilities such as movement and interactivity. They have also fostered demand for illustration’s capacity to throw something more nuanced and surprising into our endless photo scrolls. Social media has played an important role in alerting clients to innovative artists, too, and online shopping has led brands to find new ways to connect with customers in real life, which has, in turn, increased opportunities for live event illustration and store-specific installations.
Featured artists
Zoe talks to stylist Sofia Lai, whose sculptural illustrations playfully evoke the craving for acceptance that belies relationships with fashion. Headless, broken and missing limbs, torsos bulging and protruding, collapsing out of dresses, ominously leaning or sprawled on the floor – her papier mâché characters playfully animate clothing with endearing awkwardness and vulnerability.
Also interviewed is Brianna Moreno who has been commissioned by SHOWstudio, which offers a huge platform for illustration as part of its mission to create visionary online content. Every season, SHOWstudio invites illustrators to interpret the new runway collections, adding to an immense archive of approaches, including these from Brianna.
With the rise of virtual models and brands’ growing interest in gaming, there’s increasing potential for 3D illustration in fashion, and the detached, playful strangeness of Erica Ohmi’s 3D art that draws us in. Simulating anime figurines, glossy porcelain ornaments and inflatable vacanti mice, Ohmi’s meticulously rendered ZBrush images resemble uncanny souvenirs or cartoon characters gone wrong. ‘I like taking elements from mainstream 3D entertainment and combining it with fashion references,’ she says.
Olivia Twist’s collaboration with Nike is also featured, showing the potential for participatory and activist illustration practices within the field of fashion. Twist explains how ideas for the project came through her usual process, which involves ‘thinking about documenting social history as it’s unfolding or mundane moments that I see beauty in.’
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