Illustration changes the pace of a magazine as you read it and you project your own finish onto the story which gives a different sense of satisfaction to the reader.” I think they have a symbiotic relationship. “But it’s like asking what an apple can do that a banana can’t. “Photography has long been considered superior to illustration when it comes to selling magazines” says Downton. In contrast, today illustration generates great engagement, even recently making it into the realms of the still-controversial space of branded content with a campaign of illustrated fashion fairytales that ran across Vogue, GQ and Tatler which surpassed all commercial targets for a month-long campaign within the first 24 hours. We toyed with it on .uk during my decade as editor of the site from 2005 to 2015, with a shoppable version of the Fashion Illustrated Gallery (founded by William Ling stocking the work of all the prominent modern illustrators including Downton and Ling’s wife Tanya), running alongside an illustrated blog by Downton himself written from the Fumoir - but it didn’t get huge traction.
“It coincided with the rise of the celebrity photographers - and fashion always voraciously wants what is new.” “It was the death of the last grand master, René Bouché, in 1963 which really signified the end of classic fashion illustration,” says David Downton, who has almost single handedly kept illustration in the limelight over the last 20 years having sketched in the front row of the couture shows for the last 40 seasons straight illustrated countless celebrities for Vanity Fair and, in 2009, drawn Cate Blanchett for a record-selling anniversary issue of Australian Vogue - as well as having played “artist in residence” at Claridges for the last decade where he can often be found in Le Fumoir sketching anyone from Julianne Moore or Grace Jones to Michael Caine. So how come it’s barely had a look-in for almost a generation? The 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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