3/1/2024 0 Comments Sketch fashion illustrationThe video of Coddington talking about it generated 10,000 views in its first twelve hours on YouTube, while Caroline Stein’s Instagram version of Pat McGrath’s LABS generated 100 likes-a-minute for the first hour it was live. Grace Coddington and Michael Robert’s GingerNutz story in our December issue - whose cover itself generated a multitude of illustrated versions that flooded the social channels - stands as definitive proof. It has been fidgeting the industry for some time - perhaps since Nick Knight introduced Helen Downie’s Unskilled Worker into fashion's limelight two years ago, and it’s now truly kicking. Whatever the catalyst, fashion illustration is having 'a moment’. Perhaps our first Vogue under editor Edward Enninful was such a marker in the sand of the new that it has generated a naturally concurrent upsurge in nostalgia or perhaps, as technology erupts around us, we yearn for the quiet of a considered illustration, alive with the possibility of the artist's internal thoughts as much as with the potential of our own interpretation. It never completely disappeared, but recently it has come back to explosive effect. In doing so it created a visual timeline of life since Vogue began. While as a medium it has been sidelined as old fashioned in comparison to the cutting edge that photography presented - made all the more thrilling by a Bailey-esque reputation for rebellion - in those days fashion illustration led the fashion press, inspiring new attitudes and breathing new life into past ones. Call to mind the images created by Rene Gruau as Dior’s artistic director in 1947 - there is no doubt as to the part illustration used to play in fashion storytelling. In the days before photography became fashion’s key documenter, fashion illustration was just as emotive and colourful - if not more so - as the images burned onto our retinas more recently by Penn, Bailey, Day, Meisel and Mert & Marcus. ![]() The romance of images by John Ward and Carl Erickson, surrealism of Dali and Benito, and art deco of Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Georges Barbier and Harriet Meserole spun tales of arctic explorers tennis players bridal marches world travellers golfers race drivers, actresses, mothers and lovers. A picture tells a thousand stories and considering the noise that surrounds the launch of every issue of Vogue - endless hashtags and chatter about the cover model, photographer and pose, it seems inconceivable that covers in the past featured fashion illustrations elaborating far more detailed stories.
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