Leopard Is A Neutral
In springtime 2020 I was honoured to be approached by the much respected fashionista Erica Davies and her publishing team at Yellow Kite. A collection of fashion illustrations was commissioned to adorn the pages of Erica’s debut book ‘Leopard Is A Neutral: A Really Useful Style Guide’.
Former fashion editor and journalist, Erica Davies, has worked across some of the UK's biggest-selling newspapers, magazines and high street brands - and amassed thousands of followers online for her straight-talking, fun and relatable content, tips and tricks that empower women through fashion, interiors and style. In 2019 she was named by The Sunday Times as one of their top 100 online influencers. Erica is the Style Queen of Instagram!
Grounded by her personal stories and career learnings, Erica's playful, narrative debut book is packed with practical advice on how to make bold, assured style decisions everyday, ditch archaic fashion rules and harness the power of clothes to feel amazing and curate a wardrobe of happiness.
Trinny Woodall has written the book's foreward. Growing up, dreaming of and working very hard towards, a career in fashion (think Devil Wears Prada - the clichés are true), I watched Trinny on television and read her style columns in newspapers and magazines. I recognised how she helped women develop self confidence and esteem through good style choices. Trinny helped inspire my philosophy of look good, feel good, do good.
'Leopard Is A Neutral: A really useful style guide’ was the Amazon #1 Fashion Design best selling book before it was published on 17th September 2020. The book is available to purchase here or from your local bookshop.
I’m proud of this studio commission and the ink collection of leopard print fashion illustrations it inspired. Browse the collection here.
To have illustrated this book has been a dream.
welcome to my world
My fashion illustration journey began with a global childhood. As I moved from place to place, I developed a fascination of life and style. These formative nomadic travels ignited an intense curiosity of people and their uniquely personal ways. The unrooted-ness made me an outside observer, soaking up the hustle and bustle around me. I discovered everyone had their own story and I wanted to know it. Forever at the heart of my intrigue was my love of how people looked, what they wore and their sartorial choices.
It was at boarding school in the English countryside where my talent for drawing was spotted and nurtured. The rest is history.
Art schools in London and New York beckoned where found a wonderful sense of belonging in the design world. These instrumental years led me down various creatives paths until one Monday when I enrolled in a fashion illustration class at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. I will forever remember that September day in 2007 and the light filled, airy studio crammed with easels, reams of white paper and a beautiful fashion model ready to pose for the class to draw. On that Monday I met my future. I was to become a fashion illustrator.
While living in the endlessly inspiring Manhattan I developed a portfolio of fashion illustrations which I tentatively showed to industry professionals both sides of the Atlantic. During this time I worked in different areas of the fashion world - design, styling, fashion journalism and trend forecasting. To my great honour my work was overwhelmingly well received and the foundations of my career were laid.
Within a short time the client demand for fashion illustrations outweighed the time I had to illustrate, so out went working for various fashion brands and I made the bold leap to establish my own studio, which is where you find me now.
It’s here I spend my days, immersed in a world filled with luxury, fashion, design and art. I’m forever endlessly grateful that i’ve somehow totally lucked out and captured the career of my dreams.
Fashion illustration is a perfect hybrid of my fascination of people and my unadulterated adoration of art and style. My work ties together the threads of my life experiences by allowing me to study people and capture a moment in their lives while giving it an sophisticated, stylish, elegant and aspirational twist.