7 Inspiring Fashion Illustrators For Serious Inspo
I just love contemporary fashion illustration . If there's something more fantastical and otherworldly, more playful and experimental, than the dressing up box of couture itself, it's the exquisitely rendered illustrations that strive to embody it. Anything is possible in a fashion drawing: It's a place where all your dreams can spill from your nib if you have a little skill. As a lingerie designer, I love to draw and capture clothing design ideas myself in the form of illustration, so I always have my eyes peeled for inspiration from other colorful artists working in my field.When I was little, I used to draw "myself" (although I always pictured myself as a blondie wearing a crown — when I was most definitely a brunette child!) at elementary school, wearing a variety of extravagant ensembles, taking inspiration from picture books and history textbooks. I also had a penchant for paper dolls, playing dress-up with Barbie and styling myself up as various characters that captured my imagination. I think perhaps this is where my love of fashion, and fashion illustration, began!For the purpose of this article, I am defining "fashion illustration" as depicting works of art that feature images of figures wearing beautiful clothing in beautiful scenarios. Fashion illustration can be used for design purposes, to worship the collection of a haute couture design house (or any designer, really), or just to daydream. It's very easy to fall down the rabbit hole of fashion illustration, and get lost. But it's a good place to be.So without further ado, here are seven contemporary fashion illustrators to inspire you today, because sequin hair and playing dress-up with rabbits are not just for children.
1. Kat Macleod
Kat Macleod is a graphic designer and illustrator living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Not only that, but she co-directs the design studio, Ortolan. This established and prolific artist has been featured in many fashion magazines including Chinese Vogue and Numero Tokyo and has published several books. I have a copy of Like I Give A Frock — a tongue in cheek fashion commentary by Michi Girl — and it is a multi-textured dreamland!I love Kat Macleod's kooky mixed media mash-up of sequins, collage, fabric, paint, crayon, felt tip, and pencil. Somehow, her glamorous women look elegant, despite the crazy, as her drawings are so well-balanced. The minimal, delicate line drawings that describe the women's facial features and bodies are ghostly, with the focus being on the wayward hairstyles and quaint ensembles.
2. Aya Takano
Strictly speaking, Aya Takano isn't specifically a fashion illustrator, but her work always features ethereal girls in interesting clothing, and she has worked in collaboration with makeup companies and fashion houses alike. As well as working with Eyeko in the noughties, she illustrated the packaging for the 2010 Shu Uemura Christmas Collection of cosmetics, named Abrecadabra Fantasy. Fellow Japanese artiste extraordinaire Issey Miyake's 2004-05 Autumn/Winter collection was also a collaborative effort with Aya Takano — with her iconic illustrations adorning everything from umbrellas to Wellington boots to tulle dresses.
With her long-limbed, lemur-eyed, alien-like nymphets and surreal, romantic sci-fi settings, Aya Takano's paintings and drawings conjure a world of uncanny happenings. As well as being ridiculously talented, Takano is incredibly intelligent — both cute and articulate when describing her thoughtful works. In fact, she's one of my heros.
3. Kate Alexandra Mcleish
Kate Alexandra Mcleish hails from the U.K.'s Northern city of Manchester. With a degree in Embroidery, this colorful lass creates multi-textured and patterned illustrations and writes about menswear, too! Inspired by the fancy regalia of vintage clothes, old photographs of women, and haute couture, her work has a naive line quality and quaint style. Screen printed lovelies sewn with huge sequins and foils; watercolor ladies in rainwear; clashing patterns and bold color choices, define Kate Mcleish's childlike imaginings — they're just delightful!
4. Fifi Lapin
The only bunny to break into the world of couture, Fifi Lapin wins the award for cutest fashion cartoon character. If only all models were long-limbed rabbits with killer style...Created by polymath, Ruby Gatta — who is a photographer, artist, and interior designer, as well as rabbit-mother to the couture legend — Fifi Lapin has developed a cult status in the fashion world. Drawn wearing Luella, Rodarte, Valentino, and more, Ms. Lapin has the most covetable wardrobe in the world and she wears it well. I love Gatta's playful take on couture through her furry fashionista. Fifi Lapin reminds us that fashion is just fun and we shouldn't take it too seriously.
5. Daisy De Villeneuve
I discovered Daisy De Villeneuve by route of her witty and telling book, He Said, She Said . A comedic look at relationships using quotations from her friends, and accompanied by her signature felt tip constructed characters, He Said, She Said is realistically satirical.As well as publishing similar style books, Daisy De Villeneuve's work has been featured on shoe boxes and VM for Topshop, appeared in Vogue , and on the textiles that constructed Zac Posen's Spring/Summer 2011 collection .Her angular, zany illustrations have plenty of pizazz, scribbled on scrap paper or in lined notebooks. Their doodle-like immediacy packs a punch being rebellious, strong, and childlike all at once.
6. Susannah Garrod
Instagram famous Susannah Garrod is an up-and-coming illustrator who is getting herself noticed for her fairytale, inky scribbles of whimsically-clothed women. I fell in love with her airy brushstrokes when she painted my favorite outfit from Molly Goddard's collection at London Fashion Week .There's a touch of '50s fashion illustration nostalgia in Garrod's watercolor women, but they remain defiantly contemporary in their innocent and naive construction. I love her distinctively jaunty tone, which is both soft and awkward. It's a strange beauty that haunts, but still has a twinkle of impishness.
7. Velvet Wolves
Last, but by no means least, is pop culture driven " Velvet Wolves ," the illustration and apparel company created by indie illustrator Natasha Thompson. With blog banner commissions and magazine covers for Lionheart Magazine under her belt, Natasha Thompson is a rising star in the fashion illustration world. With a style that sits somewhere between photorealism and minimalism, the pixie faces of the likes of Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette , Lana Del Rey, and Game Of Thrones ' Daenerys Targaryen are carefully crafted by her pencil. Feminine, soft, and culturally on the pulse, Thompson sells prints of her gorgeous renderings. You can even purchase one of her leading ladies on a t-shirt like I did. Look !
Images: Kat Macleod ; Kate Alexandra Mcleish ; Natasha Thompson ; hocafoundation , totaltrash , missdesanantonio , dear_kukula , fifi.lapin , daisy_de_villeneuve , susannahgarrod /Instagram; YouTube/ ProjectDystopia
- University Home
- Parsons School of Design
- Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
- College of Performing Arts
- The New School for Social Research
- Schools of Public Engagement
- Parsons Paris
- Current Students
- News & Events
Francesca Granata
Associate professor of fashion studies.
Email granataf@newschool.edu
Office Location L - 2 West 13th Street
Download vCard
Francesca Granata is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. Her research centers on modern and contemporary visual and material culture with a particular focus on fashion history and theory, gender and performance studies. Her monograph Experimental Fashion, Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body (Bloomsbury / I.B. Tauris, 2017) examines the way experimental fashion at the turn of the twenty-first century mediated shifting gender norms and the AIDS crisis.
Her forthcoming edited collection An Anthology of Fashion Criticism will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021. The first anthology of its kind, the book includes critics from the late 19th century (starting with Oscar Wilde) through the present. Among the authors anthologized are cultural critics and writers (including Susan Sontag, Angela Carter, Bebe Moore Campbell, Eve Babitz and Hilton Als) alongside fashion journalists, such as Vanessa Friedman, Robin Givhan and Guy Trebay. The anthology unveils how “fashion media discourse” not only mediated the fashion ideals of those periods, but to the extent to which it was constantly intertwined with discourses outside its fields it produced “truths” surrounding gender, race, and a host of other identity categories. The book argues that fashion criticism occupied a central role in negotiating shifting gender roles as well as shifting understandings of race.
Granata has published in the journals Fashion Theory , The Journal of Design History and Fashion Practice, in magazines such as The Atlantic, as well as in a number of books and exhibition catalogues. She is the editor and founder of the non-profit journal Fashion Projects ( fashionprojects.org ), a project fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has been invited to lecture in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, the Benaki Museum, Athens, and the Somerset House, as well as universities and design schools including Cornell University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and IUAV Venezia.
In 2019 Granata curated, with Charlene K. Lau, the exhibition “ Otherworldly: Performance, Costume and Difference ” at Parsons’s Aronson Gallery as part of the Performa 19 Biennial. “Otherworldly “examined the political work at the intersections of costume, fashion and performance produced by three artists: Machine Dazzle, Narcissister and Rammellzee. It received funding from the Coby Foundation and was highlighted in The New Yorker. Granata also co-curated, with Sarah Scaturro, "Ethics + Aesthetics," the first American exhibition exploring the interconnection between fashion and sustainability, and co-wrote the accompanying exhibition catalogue .
Prior to coming to Parsons, she taught in the Visual Arts Department at Goldsmiths College and at NYU’s Visual Arts department, and was a Polaire-Weissman fellow at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. She has received grants from the University of the Arts London, the Coby Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Degrees Held
PhD, Visual and Material Culture, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
MA, Cinema and Media Studies, Tisch , NYU
BA Art History, Tufts University
BFA Visual Arts, Tufts University
Recent Publications
• Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body, London and New York: Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, February 2017
o Russian translation forthcoming Moscow: New Literary Observer, September 2020.
• An Anthology of Fashion Criticism. London and New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021
Exhibition Catalogue
Ethics + Aesthetics = Sustainable Fashion with Sarah Scaturro. Pratt Manhattan Gallery: New York, 2010
Journal Articles
• “Fashioning Cultural Criticism: An Inquiry into Fashion Criticism and its Delay in Legitimization,” reviewed and accepted, published online April 2018, forthcoming in print Fashion Theory, 2019
• “Deconstruction Fashion: Carnival and the Grotesque,” The Journal of Design History, volume 26, number 2 (May 2013): 182-198
• “Fashion Studies In-Between: A Methodological Case Study and an Inquiry into the State of Fashion Studies” Fashion Theory , volume 16, number 1 (March 2012): 67-82.
o Reprinted in Fashion Theory - Russia number 32 (Summer, 2014)
• “Multiple Systems and Composite Identities in New York Fashion: An Interview with Mary Ping” Fashion Practice, volume 1, number 2 (November 2009): 227-237
• “Subverting Assumptions of Female Beauty: An Interview with Ann-Sofie Back,” in Fashion Theory, volume 11, number 4 (December 2007)
o Reprinted in Contributor Magazine issue 6 (2012): 391-401
Articles in Books
• “Between Performance and Performativity: Leigh Bowery” in Fashion Performance and Performativity edited by Andrea Kollnitz and Marco Pecorari, forthcoming 2021
• “Exploring the Female Gaze: An Interview with Roxane Danset,” in Ane Lynge-Jorlén edited, Fashion Stylists: History, Meaning and Practice. London and New York: Bloomsbury, August, 2020
• Chapter from Experimental Fashion reprinted as "Martin Margiela's Carnivalized time: Margiela's Theatrical Costume Collection" in Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities, Edited by Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2020
o "Il Tempo Carnevalizzato. Margiela e la Collezione di Costume," Il Tempo della Moda. Edited by Caroline Evans and Alessandra Vaccari. Milano e Udine: Mimesis Edizioni, 2019
• “Afterward” to Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino’s Marchesa Casati: Infinite Variety The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, November 2017
• “Fitting Sources – Tailoring Methods: A Case-Study of Martin Margiela and the Temporalities of Fashion” in Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices, in Heike Jenss ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2016
• “Mikhail Bakhtin: Fashioning the Grotesque Body” in Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to the Key Theorists , in Agnes Rocamora and Anneke Smelik ed., London: I.B. Tauris, 2015
Edited Journals
• Fashion Projects, number 5 (2018), on Fashion Curation
• Fashion Projects, number 4 (2013), on Fashion Criticism
• Fashion Projects, number 3 (2010), on Fashion and Memory
• Fashion Projects , number 2 (2008), on Art and Fashion Collectives, and Collaboration
• Fashion Projects , number 1 (2005), on Authenticity and Forgery
Articles in Exhibition Catalogues
• “Martin Margiela and New Materialism” in Martin Margiela. Paris: Lafayette Anticipations, 2021
• Fashion Unbound” in Clash: Counterculture in Fashion , Denmark: Horning Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014
• Decentering Fashion: Carnival, Performance and the Grotesque Body,” Not a Toy: Radical Character Design in Fashion and Costume, in Vasisilis Zidianakis ed., Berlin and Athens: Atopos Contemporary Visual Culture and Pictoplasma, October 2011
• Bernhard Willhelm and Jutta Kraus, co-authored with Ingeborg Hams and Sue-an Van der Zijpp accompanying Willhelm and Krauss’ retrospective at the Groninger Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. NAI Publishers: Amsterdam, 2010
• “Fashion of Inversions: The Grotesque and the Carnivalesque in Contemporary Belgian Fashion” in Modus Operandi: State of Affairs in Current Research on Belgian Fashion , ModeMuseum: Antwerp, 2009
Articles in Magazines (selected)
• “The Alienating Garments of Rei Kawakubo,” The Atlantic , May 7, 2017
• “Consider the Garment” An Interview with Paola Antonelli, Disegno, number 16, 2017
• “Why Fashion Criticism Matters,” Form Magazine for Nordic Architecture and Design , 2013
• “Women’s Work”: An Interview with Judith Thurman,” Fashion Projects , number 4, 2013.
o Reprinted in Design Observer , 2013
• Transdisciplinary Practices: An Interview with Stefano Tonchi.” Fashion Projects , number 4, 2013
Research Interests
visual and material culture, fashion history, fashion theory, gender studies, performance studies, curation, sustainability
Awards And Honors
- The Coby Foundation
- Polaire Weissman Art History Fellowship, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
- Belgian-American Education Foundation
- New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
- University of the Arts London
Fashion Projects
Current Courses
Advanced Thesis Preparation PGFS 5200, Fall 2024
Past Courses
Fashion Unbound PLFS 4008, Spring 2024
Re-fashioning the Body PGHT 5550, Spring 2024
Take The Next Step
- Request Info
Submit your application
Undergraduates.
To apply to any of our undergraduate programs (except the Bachelor's Program for Adults and Transfer Students and Parsons Associate of Applied Science programs) complete and submit the Common App online.
Undergraduate Adult Learners
To apply to any of our Bachelor's Program for Adults and Transfer Students and Parsons Associate of Applied Science programs, complete and submit the New School Online Application.
To apply to any of our Master's, Doctoral, Professional Studies Diploma, and Graduate Certificate programs, complete and submit the New School Online Application.
IMAGES