At some point most people who work across more than one discipline are told to pick one. Narrow down, specialise, decide what you are. It is presented as maturity, the moment you stop scattering yourself and commit. I have come to believe this advice is wrong for a specific kind of person, and that the inability to choose is not indecision to be cured. It is, very often, the exact thing the work is supposed to be made of. Now, don’t get me wrong. Positioning is everything and if you’re in the beginning of your career, it is always best to be known for one thing. I see photographers saying photographer, creative director, retoucher, producer in their bio and while it’s true you do all these things. Most are not a trained creative director or have their full focus on it, it’s all part of being a photographer. If you’re further into your career and you feel the creative ick to branch out to new creative endeavors because your vision is so clear and you’ve outgrown your format, then it’s about you as a creative visionary. It’s the work only you create.

I’ve slowly come to terms that I’ve always been multi-disciplinary, I love to write, take photos, think of strategies, research deeper than the average art director but I deliberately chose to only position myself as an art director. Why? Because I believed all the things I did are part of being an art director, but when my vision expanded through expansive research and writing on Substack I slowly came to terms that I might as well be a researcher or writer. Especially when people came to my for my writing. I’ve also worked across design, film, set design and styling but all comes from the same purpose.

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Open any major campaign image posted in the last six months that looks impressive or interesting and scroll to the comments. Somewhere in the top three replies, often the very first one, you will find a single word with a question mark after it. AI???

It is happening across every house, every photographer, every register of image-making. Campaigns that took three days on set, six decision-makers in the room and an occasional budget that would build a flat in Rotterdam are being read as machine-generated within the hour. Photographers’ studios are quietly debating whether to post behind-the-scenes footage to defend the existence of work that obviously exists. It has become a recurring conversation in every working group chat I am in, and the question underneath it is the one nobody has named cleanly yet. When Miu Miu built an entire set from scratch for their ‘On Cloud Nine’ campaign, it was celebrated because of its rejection to AI.

We are all having the wrong argument about AI.

The argument we are having is about prompts, effort, disclosure, attribution, regulation. The argument we are not having is about what just stopped working underneath all of it.

What is being called an AI problem is the death of the photograph as proof.

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The photograph has been doing one quiet, enormous job in the background of every image we have looked at for a hundred years. It proved something. It carried the small, automatic claim that this happened, that someone was here, that a body and a light and a room had existed in front of a lens. Even when the photograph was staged. Even when it was retouched within an inch of its life. Even when the entire frame was a fiction, the photograph still held, somewhere in its grain, the quiet insistence that something had been there. Roland Barthes called this ça a été, that-has-been, and in Camera Lucida he argued it was the defining promise of the medium, the thing that separated photography from every other kind of image. He called the photograph a certificate of presence. That certificate has now quietly expired, and almost nobody in the industry is naming it.

What luxury was actually selling

Luxury image-making, for the last fifty years, has been built on an economic argument that depends on that promise far more than the industry has ever admitted.

You pay for a Steven Meisel or a Mert and Marcus or a Mario Sorrenti or an Inez and Vinoodh shoot because the image carries a weight a cheaper image cannot. That weight came from one specific, almost invisible thing. It carried evidence. It held the receipt of a vast, expensive, intentional production. Newton’s pools shot at night under flash. Bruce Weber’s sunlit bodies on a beach. Avedon’s seamless white wall. You could feel the budget in the frame. You could feel the casting director, the location, the catering, the three assistants holding flags just out of shot. The image was a small object that contained an enormous amount of decision-making, and the viewer registered all of it without consciously naming it, and extended belief accordingly. Most importantly, all this to sell a beautiful dress. We believed the image and appreciated the craft which made the viewer look at the main character of the shot (the clothes) with admiration.

That argument held all the way up to about a little while ago. A campaign image that obviously cost something was assumed to have been there. Belief was close to automatic. The viewer looked and understood, without articulating it, that this was the product of a real production with real people in a real room.

The viewer no longer extends that assumption. Instead everything in an impressive image is questioned these days, and even when something obviously isn’t AI, many still tend to believe this because some people seem to have lost faith in human creativity for whatever reason.

The first read on a high-production luxury image now is suspicion. Not ‘Woow, what a wonderful shot’ or “is this expensive,” which is taken as given, but “is this real,” which is a completely different question, and the industry has not caught up to the fact that it is now the first question being asked. The expensive image and the synthetic image have collapsed onto the same visual register, because at the level of finish the eye can no longer separate them. Which means the entire economic argument luxury was built on is being hollowed out while the industry is still busy pretending the only problem is regulation and disclosure.

Luxury was selling a kind of belief the viewer has stopped extending.

Why the most polished images draw the most suspicion

The campaigns being accused are not bad work. By every conventional measure they are actually very good work. The lighting is extraordinary. The casting is specific. The styling is the kind that takes ten years to build the eye for. The retouch is clean. None of it protects the image. The very things that used to certify value, visible care, visible budget, visible intention, have flipped, and now they are the cause of the suspicion.

This is the part the industry needs to name plainly, because I am watching brands and photographers refuse to name it and quietly panic instead. The most polished luxury images right now attract the most AI accusations. The best work in the business is being read as fake first and real second. We built a hundred-year-old commercial system on a default, that-has-been, that no longer fires. It is the strangest thing I have watched happen inside luxury fashion in the time I have worked in it and researched it.

Underneath that is the harder question a lot of working art directors are asking themselves and not saying out loud. If a beautifully executed campaign is going to be called AI within forty minutes of going live, what were the three days on set actually for? the countless briefs to set designers, revisions of the sketches, reviewing the materials, going through tons of model packages, the early call times, etc etc.. What was the budget for. What was the decision-making for. If the receipt has stopped working, if the viewer can no longer read the production in the frame, what exactly are we charging the client to do.

I obviously don’t have a clean answer to that yet, but as always I like to share my thoughts. I do notice the most thoughtful image-makers I know have started, very quietly, to do something about it. Things such as showing BTS, stories behind the craft and the original concept. The mystery is gone.

What the best work is starting to do instead

Look closely at the most considered campaigns and editorials coming out of luxury in the last twelve months and something has shifted in how the work is being finished.

Polish is being pulled back, on purpose. The retouch is lighter. Grain is being left in, or added back. The colour grade is less corrected. The mid-blink, mid-laugh, mid-step frame is being chosen over the flawless one. Shot on film is back, ESPECIALLY the light leaks and mistakes. The flaw is being kept rather than cleaned up.

The clearest version of this is happening in the work that is being mistaken for AI and turns out to be the opposite of it. When Szilveszter Makó shot Rama Duwaji for The Cut and Elle Fanning for Who What Wear, the internet immediately celebrated the natural light and handmade elements. Almost everything in those frames was built by hand in Makó’s studio out of cardboard, painted paper and recycled material, shot in natural daylight with no flash. The work reads as impossible, so people sometimes assume a machine made it, and then they discover it is the product of a process so laborious and so specific that no model could have generated it. That is the whole move. The image survives the question “is this AI” because the answer is so obviously, defiantly no.

I want to be careful here, because this is not the same as the candid-iPhone aesthetic, which I want to write about separately. That look performs casualness. What I am describing is subtler and almost the reverse. It is luxury image-making hiding its own polish, or routing its polish through a process so handmade that the human decision becomes undeniable, in order to be believed at all. The work is not pretending to be artless. It is refusing to look as frictionless as it used to, because frictionlessness now reads as machine.

The word I keep returning to is position. It is the same word I used in the taste essay a few weeks ago. What used to do the believing for a luxury image was production. What does it now is position. A visible point of view. A small, slightly awkward, decided thing in the frame that a model would never have generated, because the decision is too specific to one person’s taste, too specific to context, too specific to an argument about how a body should be lit or held or dressed. The receipt has stopped doing the work. The argument inside the frame has to do it now.

Three things worth sitting with this week

Open the last campaign you art-directed and ask yourself what in it could not have come from a prompt. If your answer is something specific, a piece of casting, a moment of light, a frame that broke the brief, that is the part of your work carrying the belief now. Make a note of it. That is the part becoming the value.

Look at the last three luxury campaigns you yourself believed, and articulate what specifically made you believe them. Not what was beautiful. What was believable. Notice how often the two are no longer the same thing. Notice how often the believable image is the one with something slightly wrong in it, slightly off, slightly resistant to the brief.

So what is a photograph proof of now?

Close to nothing.

The receipt has expired. The default is gone. Roland Barthes’ that-has-been has stopped firing in the viewer’s nervous system, and once a promise breaks at that scale, no amount of post-production craft repairs it on its own. The better news is that the people doing good work were never only relying on that promise anyway. The work was always doing more than carrying its own receipt. It was making an argument. About a body, about a kind of beauty or about a way of seeing. The receipt was the wrapper and the argument was the gift.

The next decade of luxury image-making belongs to the people who can put a defendable argument inside the frame, one that survives the question “is this AI” because the answer is obviously no, a machine could not have argued for this. That is a different craft than the industry has been training for, and a different brief than most clients are currently writing. It is also the work I am most interested in making right now, and the work I most want to see other people make.

The photograph stopped being proof. So the photograph has to become something else. I think it has to become a position. And I think the image-makers who understand that, who can put something into a frame that a machine could never argue for, are the ones whose work survives the next ten years.

I would love to hear from you on this one. What was the last luxury image you truly believed, and what specifically made you believe it.

Love,

Zoë

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In one of the scenes of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Nigel is talking to Andy during lunch. He pauses for a second and says something close to this: we used to camp for four weeks in Africa with Avedon, and now we’re lucky if we get two days in Milk Studios.

The audience laughed and so did I because it genuinely just felt so accurate, but it was somehow bittersweet. Most of the people sitting in that cinema always dreamed of working in fashion, but very likely not the fashion it is today (fast-paced, attention culture front and centre, fighting with ai etc etc.). The generation that grew up with fashion magazines, Sex & the City and Gossip Girl, the September Issue film and glamorising what it would be like to come up with amazing photoshoot ideas, selling a fantasy.

The line is doing more work than the script probably intended. Nigel is a fictional art director, but the gap he is describing is real, and it is the single most under-discussed dynamic shaping fashion image-making right now. Editorial budgets have collapsed, and the visual culture they used to produce is collapsing with them.

The reference is dramatic shorthand. The legendary Avedon shoot was not actually in Africa, it was five weeks in Japan in 1966 with Polly Mellen and Veruschka, and at the time it was the most expensive fashion shoot Condé Nast had ever commissioned. The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that the line evokes an era when the editorial system paid for time, place and ambition at a scale that working art directors today have simply never experienced, and will very likely never experience.

That scale built the canon. The Avedon shoots, the Newton epics, the Bourdin sets, the Meisel productions, the Roversi sittings. All of it was financed by magazines spending money that magazines no longer have. The photographs that defined how fashion looks, what fashion means and what a fashion image is even allowed to argue, were almost entirely funded by an editorial machine that no longer exists in the same form.

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Where the money used to go

Editorial was the research and development department of fashion image-making for the better part of forty years. A magazine would commission a story. The story would have a budget that allowed for travel, location, multiple models, a full team, a long shoot day or, in the major cases, several weeks. The photographer would deliver maybe five to twelve images. The styling, art direction, casting and post-production were all part of the same financed project. And the resulting work was where the next generation of advertising campaigns, brand identities and creative directors found their visual language.

It was an indirect system. Brands paid for the magazine through advertising. The magazine paid for the editorials through that advertising revenue. The editorials produced the images that defined the era. The era then fed back into the brands’ commercial work. The money flowed in a circle and everyone in the circle benefited from being part of it.

The system worked because the editorial was the prestige product. Brands wanted to be in it. Photographers wanted to shoot for it. Stylists, models, set designers, hair and make-up artists, producers, all wanted to be on the credits page. The whole industry organised itself around the editorial because the editorial was where the work that mattered actually got made.

Where the money actually went

You might wonder, where did all this money go? It didn’t vanish really, but it actually got redistributed across many channels.

Three big shifts happened, mostly between 2010 and 2020, and they happened at the same time.

The first shift was advertising leaving print for digital and social. Brands realised they could spend on Instagram and reach far more people more cheaply than buying a Vogue ad. The advertising revenue that funded the editorial system started draining out.

The second shift was brands going direct. Instead of paying a magazine to commission an editorial that featured their clothes, brands started commissioning their own content. Campaign films, brand books, content series, social-first shoots. The image-makers who used to shoot editorials are now shooting branded content directly for the houses. The money is still being spent, but it is being spent on work the brand fully controls.

The third shift was the cover becoming a celebrity property. The cover used to be the showcase of the magazine’s image-making. Now it is largely a press deliverable for the celebrity, with the celebrity’s team controlling stylist approval, photographer approval, image approval and rights. The cover budget still exists, but the editorial freedom that the budget used to underwrite has been transferred to the celebrity’s publicist. But even for brands, they had to compete with these celebrity names so they pay tons of money for celebrities to be in their campaign instead of just being seen on the red carpet. This leaves so much less money for the creative idea, because the face is doing the heavy lifting. And even less money for the creatives actually executing a mediocre idea.

The net effect for working image-makers is that the editorial system that used to pay for the conditions that produced the canon is now running on a fraction of its former revenue, with a fraction of its former freedom, and with a far higher number of deliverables per shoot day.

It is now possible to walk onto a major magazine cover shoot and have one day to capture the cover image, a back-of-book story, a behind-the-scenes video, social-first vertical content, two Instagram Reels, a TikTok teaser, and a stills package for the celebrity’s team to use across their own channels. All on the same day. With the same photographer. With the same crew.

That is not the same job that produced the canon, that is a different job entirely. As someone who has worked with big name celebrities before as an art director, I like to call it a military operation. So much goes into logistics and coming up with creative ideas to capture as much in a short time so all channels are happy, that it doesn’t fully matter anymore how great the original concept was. The deliverables will always be overwritten by the creative.

Why most major covers look the way they look

If the cover has become a celebrity press deliverable, and the deliverables have multiplied while the day has shrunk, the only logical output is what we see now. Most major covers are technically competent, visually safe and visually forgettable.

The argument is not that celebrity covers are inherently weaker than non-celebrity covers. The argument is that the format has collapsed the brief. When a publicist’s veto list is longer than the photographer’s mood board, when the agent has approval on which crop appears on the cover, when the four-hour shoot window has to deliver 25 things, the photographer is not making a cover. The photographer is taking a press shoot with the magazine’s logo printed over it.

This is why the editorials that move the needle now almost always come from one of two places. Either a photographer with enough commercial revenue from brand work to self-finance an editorial project they care about, basically getting a platform for their own creative ideas. Or an independent magazine running on goodwill and a network of creatives willing to work for credit and the chance to make something good.

Both of those models have something in common. The money is no longer coming from the magazine. It is coming from the photographer, the team, or the brand directly. The editorial is being made on top of the magazine’s masthead rather than because of it. Ofcourse magazine editorials are not always unpaid, but for most people on the team it’s more a credibility thing now than something they could live off.

What this does to visual culture

This is the part of the conversation that gets the least attention and matters most!

When budgets shrink, scale disappears. When scale disappears, the kinds of images that can be made shrink with it. A shoot built around four weeks in a remote location produces a different kind of image to a shoot built around eight hours in a studio with social deliverables stacked on top of it. The first is a meditation. The second is a transaction. Both are valid forms. Only one of them has historically pushed visual culture forward.

The work that defined fashion image-making in the second half of the twentieth century pushed visual culture because it was slow, expensive and remote. The slowness gave the team time to make choices. The expense gave the photographer permission to take risks. The remoteness gave the work a sense of place that anchored it in the world. Strip those conditions out and you do not get the same kind of image with a smaller budget. You get a different kind of image entirely. One that is closer to documentation than to argument.

This matters because the images that argue something are also the images that build culture. The Bourdin shots that argued for surrealism in commercial photography, bascially his grandiose images got trickled down. The Helmut Newton shots that argued for power as the subject of the fashion image. Even the Corinne Day shots that argued for the body without the gloss the industry had insisted on for a decade. Each of those bodies of work needed either budget, space or freedom to exist, and each of them changed what fashion images could do afterwards. Then these editorial images are the blueprint for what happens in commercial photography, today neither of them are really.

When the budget goes, the argument-making images don’t disappear entirely. They migrate. They start appearing in independent zines, in self-financed editorials, in artist books, in exhibitions, in personal Substack publications. They stop being the main product of the industry and become a side project of the industry’s most senior or most stubborn working practitioners.

That migration has consequences. The images that build visual culture are now harder to find, harder to fund and harder to circulate. The mainstream of fashion image-making is getting flatter while the work that pushes the form is being driven further to the margins. The people who suffer most are the working art directors and image-makers at the start of their careers, who are inheriting a system where the conditions that produced the work they admire have been quietly dismantled and their work often isn’t in favour of the algorithm either.

The AI question

I wrote in a recent essay about where I think fashion image-making is heading in the coming years, and the counter-reaction to AI that I think will push image-making back toward humanity, intimacy and the visible hand of the human image-maker.

That counter-reaction is real. But it is happening inside an industry that no longer funds the conditions that produced the humanity in the original images. The four-week shoot with the close-knit team in a remote location is what built the trust and intimacy that the great editorial photographs hold. You cannot reproduce that intimacy in eight hours in Milk Studios with a publicist standing behind the photographer. You can fake it, but the resulting image is closer to performance than presence.

This is the structural problem the AI conversation tends to skip. The argument that humans will out-photograph AI rests on the assumption that humans still have access to the conditions that allow them to make distinctly human images. They mostly don’t. And the budget collapse is the reason.

The most honest reading of where image-making is heading is that the human counter-reaction will only produce work as strong as the conditions allow it to. The image-makers who can self-finance their own conditions will produce the strongest work. The image-makers who cannot will be left making competent transactional images that AI can plausibly replicate, because the conditions for making anything else have been removed. And then there is the group of highly creative geniusses who are capable of actually creating original ideas on low-budgets, but are incredibly hard to find because they are dependent on the algorithm and we all know that the algorithm doesn’t love unfamilliar images…

In order to beat the ai image-making on a lower budget we can conclude it can either come from, like I mentioned in my other post to show the human craft on purpose and lean into that, be incredibly creative and innovative or invest a big portion of money into your editorial work.

What working image-makers can do about it

The diagnosis is not the prescription. The industry is what it is. Working art directors and image-makers have to navigate it from inside and make the most of what it is.

A few things are worth holding in mind.

Pitch budget transparently. Most working creatives at editorial level still treat budget as a polite thing to avoid discussing in the brief. The photographers and art directors who are getting their best work made are the ones who name the budget required to make the work properly, and accept that some publications will not be able to meet it. Better to know early than to compress a vision down to what a starved budget can support.

Push for one strong image over six adequate ones. This is the move that resists the deliverables-stacking dynamic. If you can hold the line on the brief, you can produce one image that anchors the editorial. The rest can be supporting material. The single strong image is what circulates and what gets remembered.

Build self-financed projects with clear publication outcomes. The strongest work being made by mid-career image-makers right now is being produced outside the editorial system entirely. Self-initiated shoots with a target publication in mind. Personal projects shopped to magazines as finished editorials. Zines and artist books that exist on their own terms. The economics are difficult but the creative control is total, and the work travels.

Co-finance with brands directly. Skip the magazine as middleman where you can. Pitch the editorial to the brand directly, with the magazine as a placement outcome rather than the funder. This is increasingly how the strongest editorials are being made.

Use the platform model to fund the practice. A working audience that pays attention is now one of the most valuable things a creative can build. Whether that audience is on Substack, on Patreon, on an email list or on a sustained Instagram practice. The economics of paid attention are still being figured out, but the people building audiences now are the ones who will have the most flexibility in what they choose to make over the next ten years.

Where this leaves us

The money left the page. It didn’t disappear, it moved and got distributed. Most of it now sits in brand budgets, advertising platforms and celebrity ecosystems. The editorial system that paid for the canon is running on a fraction of its former revenue. The conditions that produced the great fashion photographs of the last forty years have been quietly dismantled.

The appetite for those images is still there. People still want to be moved by fashion photography. They still want to argue with it, react to it, save it, frame it, send it to a friend. The work that produces that response is harder to make and harder to fund than it has been at any point in living memory, but the audience for it has not gone anywhere.

The image-makers who figure out the new financing model for the great editorial are the ones whose work will define the next decade. Not the ones who lament the lost conditions. The ones who build new ones.

That is the conversation worth having. Not where the money went, but what comes next.

Where do you see the money actually going inside fashion image-making right now, and what is it producing? I’d love to know which projects you think are doing the most interesting work with the budgets that do exist.

Love,

Zoë

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The strongest creative partnerships in fashion image-making almost always start the same way. Two people who are nobody yet recognise something in each other's eye, and they decide to keep working together from there. Years pass. Both careers grow. The partnership grows with them. By the time the industry catches up, the work is inseparable from the relationship that made it.

Corinne Day, Melanie Ward and Kate Moss met when none of them had anything and together made the work that defined the 1990s. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin met at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in the early 1980s and have shot as a single working unit ever since. Marc Ascoli was a young art director when he first commissioned an unknown Nick Knight for Yohji Yamamoto in the late 1980s, and together they reset what a fashion catalogue could look like. Martin Margiela and Inge Grognard met at the Royal Academy in Antwerp and she has done the make-up on every Margiela show and image since the first collection in 1988. Marc Jacobs and Katie Grand met when she was a young editor at Dazed and he was still finding his audience, and two decades later they were running every Louis Vuitton campaign together. Pat McGrath and Edward Enninful began working together in early-1990s London when McGrath was a self-taught make-up artist and Enninful was the teenage fashion director at i-D, and both of them now sit at the top of the industry.

The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence. The image-makers and designers we still talk about almost never built their careers alone, and they almost never built them with people who were already famous. They built them with someone they found at the same stage they were at. The same person, sometimes more than one, but always a sustained working relationship forged before either party had anything to offer beyond their eye and their time.

The industry's preferred story is the singular auteur with the singular vision. The photographer with the unmistakable hand. The designer who reinvents the house. The stylist who walks in and makes the look. But if you read the interviews with the people we treat as canonical, almost none of them describe their work that way. They name their collaborators. Often the same ones they met before anyone knew either of their names.

That gap, between how the work is actually built and how the work is talked about, is the most under-discussed dynamic in fashion image-making. The person you will be making your defining work with in ten years is probably someone you could be working with right now, while both of you are still building.

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We are working through a moment in which image production has become functionally infinite. AI generates a technically polished visual from a prompt in seconds. Social platforms reward the images that already resemble what already worked. Competent execution is the floor. What stands out is a recognisable hand. A point of view. A signature.

Signatures are rarely something you build alone. The way the canon actually works is that image-makers and designers find one or two people whose taste is in real alignment with theirs, and then they make work together over years until the work has a name. Corinne Day and Melanie Ward did this. Rafael Pavarotti and Ib Kamara are doing it now. The signature belongs to both of them.

Corinne Day and Melanie Ward are worth slowing down on. What they did together is impossible to attribute to either one of them. The famous ‘The 3rd Summer of Love’ editorial for The Face, July 1990, with Kate Moss on Camber Sands. Corinne Day shot it. Melanie Ward styled it. The image broke from the polished glamour of 1980s fashion photography because they wanted it to, together. Day’s photographs hold the moment, but Ward’s casting and styling produced what Day was photographing. They went on to shoot for British, American and Italian Vogue, mostly together. Corinne Day’s career was cut short by illness and she died in 2010. Ward went on to a forty-year career working with Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein, the visual codes of which were shaped by what she had developed with Corinne at the start. The signature was joint.

Rafael Pavarotti and Ib Kamara are the contemporary version of the same story. Kamara was a young stylist working in London. Pavarotti was a young photographer working out of Brazil. They first connected on Instagram in 2018, after Kamara saw a Vogue Brasil editorial Pavarotti had shot the year before. Kamara flew to Belém shortly after, and they made their first body of work together there, photographing Pavarotti's family and community. Their early editorials ran in i-D and Double, drawing directly on their respective backgrounds in Sierra Leone and the Amazon. Kamara went on to become Editor-in-Chief of Dazed in 2021, then Art and Image Director at Off-White in 2022, succeeding Virgil Abloh after his death. Pavarotti now shoots major campaigns for Dior, Maison Margiela, Balmain and Ferragamo, and has photographed multiple Vogue covers including Beyoncé's July 2022 British Vogue cover. They climbed together. Neither name would be where it is without the other.

The pattern repeats. Nick Knight and Simon Foxton, working together at i-D since the late 1980s. Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, who met in London in the late 1990s and have shot as a unit ever since. Dries Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe, life partners and business partners across four decades. The pattern keeps repeating because the partnership is the mechanism.

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The four longer-running partnerships I think are most worth studying in detail, and what each one teaches about durability over time. Then the practical playbook I have been building in my own practice. How to identify the right working partner from existing taste signals rather than status. How to make first contact in a way that actually gets read. How to structure a first project as a chemistry test. How to escalate from there up the editorial ladder. And how to pitch collaborators into commercial work alongside editorial so the partnership earns its own sustainability over years.

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I hope you’re all well. I’ve been very busy the past few weeks, many shoots and a few in post, lots of pitches and a few more coming up that I’m excited about. I’ve been pushing myself outside what I usually go for this year, working with different photographers, different styling registers, and different types of subjects, partly to find wh…

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This is a bit of a different post that I’ve been considering writing for a super long time, probably three years to be exact, which is how long this Substack exists. I had a few meetings recently where the same observation came back to me at different moments. The phrase that came up was wondering who I actually was, the person writing this …

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On my Substack I often try to articulate my personal creative frustrations. Things I "hate" about my own work, decisions I'm trying to understand and trace back to where they came from. I've been thinking about something that comes up in almost every campaign I work on, especially for the bigger, well-known brands with images to protect and …

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I have been thinking about Helmut Lang a lot lately. Not the brand itself, the brand has had a complicated twenty years and we will get to that. I mean the visual argument and the way his images looked. The way they refused to look like anything else that was happening at the time. And the fact that I keep seeing that same argument, that same refusal, showing up in the work of designers and image-makers who may not even know they are carrying it. I think people who know me, know that I have a profound love for 90’s minimalism. I love considered art direction where the concept itself speaks, where every choice feels deliberate and it’s not so decorative.

It started a few weeks ago when I was going through a folder of recent campaign images for a project. I had pulled together maybe 40-ish references from the last two seasons. Midway through I stopped and looked at the folder as a whole, the way you do when you step back from a mood board. And I realised something. At least a third of those images were making the same set of decisions. The same matte light. The same close crop and similar casting. The same typographic restraint. They were all speaking the same language. But none of them were crediting the person who wrote it or were part of the brand beyond that time.

That person is Helmut Lang. And what I want to do in this essay is trace the sentence he started, name the people who picked it up, and ask what happens when an argument becomes so widely adopted that it stops being an argument and starts being a default.

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I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while. Not just because Sofia Coppola is one of the most visually referenced directors of our generation, that part is obvious, and honestly a little overdone at this point, but because what I find genuinely fascinating is everything that exists around the films. The publishing imprint, the fashion c…

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Happy easter weekend! Hope you’re having a good one. I’m winding down after an intense week of driver lessons and failing my exam (mehhh) but also working on so many super exciting passion projects.

Workwise also, I have spent the last few weeks looking at portfolios. Not casually, and not in the way I usually encounter them, which is when someone sends a link and I open it between meetings with half my attention already elsewhere. I mean properly sitting with them. Thirty, maybe forty portfolios across photography, art direction, styling, design. Some from people I know. Most from people I have never worked with. I started doing this partly because I had been thinking about what makes a portfolio actually do its job, and I realised I had strong instincts about it but had never really taken the time to articulate them. So I did. And the more I looked, the more I started to see patterns. Not in the work itself, but in how the work was being presented, and what that presentation was quietly saying about the person behind it.

That process is what led to this series. Over the next five posts, I am going to write about portfolios in a way I have not seen written about before. Not simply the technical stuff or which website builder to use or how many projects to include. I want to talk about the strategic and psychological dimensions of portfolio building, because I think that is where most creatives are getting stuck without realising it. The work is often good. The container it sits in is letting it down.

It also led to something else, something that came from demand in the last two years. I have just launched a one-on-one session called The Portfolio Audit, where we sit down together and go through your portfolio properly. We look at what impression it is actually leaving, where the gaps are between what you want and what someone sees, and what needs to shift to start attracting the briefs you are after.

We start with a proper intake, what type of clients you want to attract, if you want to pivot and what your overall goals are. Then we schedule a 45 minute call in which I go through your portfolio in detail and you can ask any question you want to help position yourself. After the call you have a properly written feedback session as credit after you’ve audited your portfolio (and you can take however long you need.) You leave with a clear position, written feedback, and practical direction. I am running six of these a month only, because it’s a big time commitment from me and I want to really give it my full attention.

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Now. The archetypes.

What I mean by archetype

When I talk about portfolio archetypes, I am not talking about personality types like INFJ (that’s me!) or branding exercises. I am talking about something more specific, which is the strategic impression a portfolio creates in the first 60 seconds someone spends with it. Every portfolio, whether the person behind it has thought about this or not, is communicating a particular kind of creative identity. It is saying something about how you think, what you prioritise, and what it would be like to work with you. The problem is that most portfolios are communicating several of these things at once, and the result is that they communicate none of them clearly.

I think there are five distinct archetypes that I have seen work consistently across different disciplines and career stages. Each one represents a different strategic position, a different kind of authority, and a different relationship to the viewer. They are not better or worse than each other. But they do require different decisions about what to show, how to show it, and what to leave out. And the single most important thing I can say at the start of this series is that you need to pick one. Not two. Not a blend. One.

Let me walk through them.

The Mysterious

The Mysterious portfolio is defined by restraint and visual control. It shows very little and says even less. The work tends to be presented large, with generous negative space, minimal or no project descriptions, and an overall feeling of deliberate withholding. There is a confidence embedded in this approach that communicates something specific: this person does not need to explain themselves. The work is the explanation. And often the work is a very tight selection of their best.

This archetype works exceptionally well for photographers and art directors whose images are genuinely strong enough to carry the full weight of communication on their own. Think of portfolios where you land on the page and there is one image, maybe two, and you already understand the sensibility. The palette, the casting, the light, the composition. It all coheres so tightly that language would only dilute it.

The risk of The Mysterious is that it can read as empty rather than restrained if the work is not there to support it. I have seen portfolios that clearly aspire to this archetype but do not have the visual authority to pull it off, and the result is a website that feels unfinished rather than considered. If you are going to withhold information, the information you do present has to be working extremely hard. Every image has to earn its place. There is no room to include a project because it was a big client or because it filled a gap in the grid. The Mysterious only works when every single thing on the page is doing exactly what it needs to do. You should take care of every single detail with a lot of love, while trying to communicate that you kinda not care about having a portfolio.

The Intellect

The Intellect portfolio leads with thinking. It foregrounds process, research, and the conceptual framework behind the work. Project descriptions are substantial. There might be references cited, or a written introduction that frames the creative approach before any images appear. The about page is often the strongest page on the site, because the person behind it understands that their value proposition is not just what they make but how they think.

This archetype is particularly effective for art directors, creative directors, and strategically minded designers whose work is shaped by ideas rather than pure aesthetics. The Intellect signals to a potential client or collaborator that you bring rigour. That you have a point of view. That briefing you will be a conversation.

Where The Intellect can go wrong is when the writing overwhelms the work. I have seen portfolios where the case studies are beautifully written but the images feel like an afterthought, illustrations of a concept rather than the concept made visual. The balance has to be there. The thinking should frame and elevate the visual work, not replace it. And the writing itself has to be good. A mediocre case study does more damage than no case study at all, because it suggests that your thinking is as unresolved as your prose.

The Hyper Niche

The Hyper Niche portfolio does one thing, and everything on the site reinforces that one thing. It might be still life. It might be beauty. It might be architectural interiors or food or a very particular kind of portrait work. Whatever it is, the portfolio says it clearly and says it repeatedly. There is no section for “other work” or “personal projects” that veers into a different genre. Every page, every project, every image confirms the same specialism.

This is the archetype that makes some creatives uncomfortable because it feels like closing doors. And it does close doors. That is the point. The Hyper Niche works because it trades breadth for depth, and in doing so it becomes extremely easy for the right person to find you and immediately understand what you do. When a brand is looking for someone who shoots a particular kind of image, they are not browsing generalist portfolios hoping to stumble across the right thing. They are looking for someone whose entire body of work confirms the specialism they need.

The trap of The Hyper Niche is stagnation. If your portfolio only does one thing and you do that one thing the same way for five years, the niche starts to feel like a limitation rather than a position. The most effective Hyper Niche portfolios show evolution within the constraint. The specialism stays consistent, but the thinking within it deepens and shifts. You can see the person growing.

The World Builder

The World Builder portfolio presents work as a series of complete environments. Each project feels like a world you could step into. There is a strong sense of atmosphere, of narrative, of things existing beyond the edges of the frame. This archetype is less about individual images and more about the feeling of coherence across a project. The World Builder is saying: I do not just make images. I make contexts.

This works brilliantly for creatives who think in campaigns, in editorial spreads, in collections of images that gain meaning through their relationship to each other. Fashion art directors, set designers, stylists whose work has a strong environmental dimension. The World Builder portfolio tends to be project-led rather than image-led, because the unit of meaning is the project.

The danger here is incoherence between worlds. If each project exists in its own self-contained universe with no connective tissue to the next, the portfolio can feel scattered even if each individual project is strong. The most compelling World Builder portfolios have an underlying sensibility that connects everything, a through line that might be tonal, or material, or atmospheric, but that makes the entire body of work feel like it comes from one mind.

The Practitioner

The Practitioner portfolio is grounded in craft and professional authority. It tends to include a wider range of work than the other archetypes, but what holds it together is a visible standard of execution and a clear sense of reliability. The Practitioner is saying: I am extremely good at what I do, I have done it across a range of contexts, and you can trust me with your project.

This archetype is common among more established creatives who have built a career across multiple industries or formats. It is also effective for creatives who work in production-heavy fields where the ability to deliver consistently at a high level is as important as having a distinctive point of view. The Practitioner portfolio does not rely on mystique or conceptual framing. It relies on evidence.

Where The Practitioner gets into trouble is when range becomes the organising principle rather than quality. Including everything you have ever done because you want to show breadth is not the same as curating a selection that demonstrates versatility within a standard. The Practitioner still has to edit. The difference is that the editing is in service of demonstrating capability across contexts rather than narrowing toward a single position.

Now you have the five. You have probably already started to see yourself in one of them, or perhaps in two or three, which is exactly the problem I want to address. Because knowing the archetypes is only useful if you can figure out which one to actually commit to. And that is harder than it sounds, because the answer is rarely the one that feels most comfortable.

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Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago I wrote about research practice as a form of creative identity, and the gap between collecting images and actually thinking through them. The response told me something I already suspected: a lot of us are navigating this quietly, building workarounds, going offline, scanning things that have never been digitised, because the platforms that are supposed to support creative research have slowly become part of the problem they were meant to solve.

The issue is structural. When a platform is optimised for engagement, it surfaces what people already respond to. When it surfaces what people already respond to, everyone’s references begin to converge. That convergence is not a failure of individual taste so much as a predictable outcome of a particular kind of infrastructure. Researcher Kate Crawford has described this as aesthetic flattening, and it is one of the defining conditions of image culture right now: everyone drawing from the same water, producing work that is technically strong and intellectually indistinguishable. The tools we use are not neutral. They shape how we see, what we reach for, and eventually what we make.

Cosmos was built from a specific position on this problem. As someone who, besides scanning vintage magazines and looking outside the internet for inspiration, I’m also a big fan of Pinterest and Instagram alternatives that drew me to new types of inspiration. Andy McCune, the founder of Cosmos for example, has spoken about believing that creatives are only as good as their source material, and that the current image ecosystem has been working quietly against the quality of that material for years.

The platform has grown to millions of users, is used by creative teams at Nike, Apple and others, and recently raised a $15 million Series A. But what interests me most is not the scale. It is the set of decisions behind it: the choice to restore provenance to images so that context travels with them, the choice not to serve ads, the use of AI for attribution rather than generation, the deliberate seeding of the algorithm with a curated community instead of letting engagement data alone determine what surfaces. These are infrastructure decisions, and infrastructure decisions are always also philosophical ones.

For today’s newsletter I am super excited to have my very first interview on ART DIRECTION with Andy.

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Zoe: You have described building Cosmos from a belief that the internet lost something specific in the last decade, when images became content and inspiration became noise. What was the moment that made that feel like a problem worth building a company around, rather than just a cultural frustration to live with?

Andy: It was more of a recurring feeling than a specific moment. I’d save an image because something about it hit me, and then I’d lose it. Sometimes literally — buried in Instagram saves or a pile of screenshots — but I’d also lose the thread of why it mattered. If I found it again, the context that made it click was gone.

It wasn’t that good inspiration vanished. What disappeared were the conditions that let images mean something. The feed replaced images and inspiration with Reels and short-form video. It became a minefield of hyper-optimized 2 second hooks grabbing for your attention. You adjusted, started scrolling faster. And eventually you stopped really seeing anything.

The shift from frustration to building a company came from realizing that wasn’t inevitable. It was a product decision. Someone decided the feed should work that way, which meant someone could decide differently.

Zoe: One of the things Cosmos has done that I find genuinely radical is build a system that restores the source to images: who made something, when, in what context, and what its cultural lineage is. Before a reference gets reposted, the credit disappears, the original meaning dissolves into the new one. What does that loss of context actually cost us, not just ethically but creatively, in terms of how we think and what we make?

Andy: The moment an image gets reposted, credit disappears. The poster, not the artist, is foregrounded. Everything is seen, but little is understood. No one knows who made it, when, or why. That’s a fundamental break in how creative work should be understood and built upon.

When we research an image on Cosmos, we’re asking basic questions that should never have been lost: Who made this? When? Where was it published? What’s its cultural lineage? Imagine walking through a museum and not being able to read the plaques on the wall. Knowing a photograph is from 1973 Tokyo versus 2019 Brooklyn is meaningful.

Creators deserve attribution. People deserve context. And inspiration needs roots. Beautiful images become more beautiful when you understand the story behind them.

Zoe: The decision to seed Cosmos’s algorithm with a curated community over letting pure engagement data determine what surfaces is an unusual one. What did you learn from making that choice, and what would the platform look like today if you had not made it?

Andy: If we’d let pure engagement data lead from the start, Cosmos would look like everything else. The most-saved images would surface most, which sounds logical until you realize that optimizing for saves is just optimizing for familiarity. You end up in a loop — popular taste confirming itself, and anything unexpected or tailored to you gets buried before it finds its audience.

Seeding with a hand-selected, curated community meant the algorithm learned from people who had points of view. These are not only prolific curators, but also discerning ones. That’s a different signal. It meant the platform developed a sensibility before it had scale, which is much harder to retrofit than to build in from the beginning. Quality of input determines quality of output in ways that compound over time.

Zoe: The platform’s value depends partly on the quality of what the community brings to it. How do you protect that as you grow, particularly as the audience expands beyond people who came to Cosmos already knowing what they were looking for?

Andy: The question isn’t really about scale, it’s about what flavor of taste the platform is organized around. Plenty of large platforms have strong aesthetic cultures — places like Tumblr, or more fringe like 4chan. The issue is whether that culture is driven by quality or by consensus, and those aren’t the same thing.

What distinguishes Cosmos is the quality of the imagery. When the inputs are high enough, the platform develops a gravitational pull. New users orient toward it. The standard becomes self-reinforcing.

That doesn’t happen by accident. We’re onboarding a curated set of artists, designers, and archives through verified profiles — people whose body of work and taste set the tone for everyone who follows. That’s what determines whether a culture compounds or collapses as it grows.

Zoe: AI can now generate a technically competent image in seconds, which raises a question the creative industry has not fully answered yet: what is the irreplaceable thing that human visual intelligence actually offers? Where do you think the line sits between what AI can do in the image space and what it fundamentally cannot?

Andy: AI can generate an image, but it can’t have a motivation for making it.

Human visual intelligence is relational. A photographer deciding what angle to shoot, a designer choosing a reference — those are acts of judgment that come from a specific life, a specific set of obsessions, a specific emotion. The image is the output. The point of view, the backstory, the desire is what feeds that.

AI can synthesize everything that’s come before with good-enough fidelity. But it has no stake in the result, no experience that preceded it. People feel that difference even when they can’t articulate it. The line sits at intention, desire, and passion.

Zoe: There is a real tension in building a platform for creative research: the moment something surfaces widely enough to be useful, it begins to enter the shared visual language and loses some of what made it interesting. We have watched this happen to entire visual languages in real time. Do you think genuine creative originality is still possible in a culture this saturated, and what does it actually require from someone who wants to protect it?

Andy: I’d make the case that genuine originality has never existed, and that letting go of that idea is freeing.

Your work is a reflection of your inputs. References, context, emotional state, the specific problem you’re trying to solve — these converge with something harder to name, a creative force that’s yours alone, and produce an outcome. But that outcome was always coming from somewhere.

What actually differentiates creative work isn’t the absence of influence, it’s the singularity of the vision. The particular combination of references, the mindset you brought, the moment you were in. Two people with identical influences will make completely different things because the human variables are irreducible.

So the question of protecting originality is the wrong question. The real question is how intentional you are about what you’re absorbing and why. That’s what Cosmos is built for. Not to help people avoid influence, but to help them have a deeper relationship with it.

Zoe: The creatives who use Cosmos most seriously, as a genuine research tool and more than just a collection habit, what do they do differently? What separates someone building a real visual practice through it from someone who is essentially curating beautifully?

Andy: In the early days, Cosmos was mostly creative professionals — designers, art directors, photographers — people pulling references for specific projects.

But what we’ve found is that the gap between those two uses is smaller than it looks. What closes it is giving people the tools to go deeper, with multiple ways to search and filter, by color, by image, by filtering out AI-generated content. It’s about the ability to follow a thread, and fall down rabbit holes they didn’t know existed. Whether you’re a creative director building a reference deck or someone who’s obsessively into clock-face design (a real person on Cosmos), the experience of discovery should feel the same, like you’re opening a door into a whole new visual world.

Zoe: There is a lot of creative advice that tells people to be more intentional about their research, to slow down, to ask questions of every image before they save it. But instinct also matters. Something can hold your attention before you know why, and the why only surfaces later. How do you think about the relationship between instinct and intention in the way creatives actually build a visual practice?

Andy: Instinct and intention aren’t a sequence, they’re in dialogue. Something stops you before you know why. You save it. Later, looking back at what you’ve collected, the why surfaces. But then that understanding sharpens your instinct the next time. They feed each other. But, you also don’t need to look back. The process of choosing inspiration trains your intuition, your taste. This is a muscle, even if you don’t dive back into what you saved.

Interrupting instinct with interrogation kills the flow. We want the experience of using Cosmos to feel like flying — moving fast, following the pull, falling into visual worlds. The user experience keeps you in that flow, so when you’re ready to step back and ask what your collection is telling you, everything you need is already there.

Zoe: What do you think the next decade looks like for image culture, specifically for how working creatives build archives, protect the integrity of their source material, and maintain a point of view that is genuinely theirs rather than a product of what the algorithm has shown them?

Andy: The feed was designed to move you along, and in moving, it flattens. Everything gets the same real estate, the same lifespan, the same context-free scroll.

What’s missing is an environment where visual work can actually live and breathe — where a creative’s archive is permanent, discoverable, and treated with the same care as the work itself. Museums and institutions have figured out versions of this. Creatives haven’t had anything that comes close.

That’s what the next decade looks like to me, and what Cosmos is built for. A design environment where inspiration has a home — where your archive grows with you, stays discoverable, and reflects a point of view that’s genuinely yours rather than a product of what an algorithm decided to show you.

What stayed with me most after this conversation was Andy’s answer on originality, specifically the idea that the question of protecting it is the wrong question entirely, and that the real work is in how intentional you are about what you absorb and why.

That reframe feels important. A lot of anxiety in creative circles right now is pointed in the wrong direction, toward avoiding influence, toward finding something no one has referenced yet, toward originality as a kind of purity. But the images that carry genuine authority have never come from nowhere. They have come from a particular combination of sources, a specific moment, a point of view that was built slowly and deliberately over time.

What Cosmos is trying to offer, at its best, is the infrastructure for that kind of intentionality. Not a shortcut to originality, but a better environment for the real work that produces it. That feels worth paying attention to.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Love,

Zoë

This post is NOT sponsored by Cosmos.

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been in a weird headspace creatively this week. Not blocked exactly, but circling. Maybe also a little bit of a writers block too. I opened an old project folder from about two years ago and started scrolling through the reference decks and final selects, and I had this moment where I thought, this looks …

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Hi everyone,

The question I get most often, more than any question about portfolios, clients, rates, or creative direction, is some version of this:

Where do I actually start?

Where do I start learning about images? About fashion photography and why it looks the way it does? About visual culture, about theory, about the gaze, about why certain references carry weight and others don’t? I want to understand this properly. I’ve tried reading some books, but I get lost. I have seventeen tabs open. I’ve saved four hundred images on a mood board but I still can’t explain what connects them.

Every time I get this question, I give the same incomplete answer. Read Ways of Seeing. Watch the Diana Vreeland documentary. And people do and then they write back saying: okay, and now what? What comes after that? How do these things connect? What should I read next, and in what order, and how do I know when I actually understand something versus when I’ve just consumed it?

I have never had a satisfying answer to this. Until now really, because I wanted to come up with a better answer to all the DM’s.

There is a trend right now of people building their own curriculums, study plans, reading lists, personal syllabi shared on Substack and in newsletters. I find it genuinely exciting. It suggests that something is shifting: that people working in creative fields have started to feel the gap between what their formal education gave them and what their actual work requires. They are building the thing that wasn’t built for them.

But there is a problem with the solo curriculum. And it is not a discipline problem, most of the people I know who are piecing together their own visual education are extremely disciplined. They buy the books. They watch the documentaries. They read the essays. The problem is something else.

The problem is that learning alone is genuinely harder than learning together. Not because you need someone to hold you accountable, though that helps. Because knowledge is a conversation, and conversations require other people.

When you read a difficult text alone, you have no one to ask is this what they mean? When you look at a photograph alone, you have no one to say did you notice that? The ideas stay in your head, unverified, slightly uncertain. You’re not sure if you’ve really understood something or just read the words. The gap between consuming an idea and actually being able to use it, to talk about it, write about it, argue with it, is where solo learning often stalls.

There is a reason school works, even bad school. It’s not the curriculum itself.. It’s the container: a group of people agreeing to think about the same things at the same time, with someone to point them in a direction. The direction matters less than the shared attention. People reading about the same topic they are genuinely interested in and discussing. It’s like a bookclub, but learning about a broader subject.

Here is something else that is something I want to work on, and I feel a bit arrogant saying it, but the education I am talking about is not widely accessible. I learned most of it myself. Yeah I did go to shcool, but even then you learn a lot yourself because of your own curiosity in certain subjects.

The knowledge of how images work — the history of photography, the theory of the gaze, the global traditions of fashion and dress and visual culture, this knowledge exists mostly behind expensive walls. Art school, where you pay €40,000 a year and spend three years in critique rooms debating references. Academic journals, where a single essay costs €30 to download and assumes you have already read fifty other essays. The dense theoretical texts that are technically free to find but written in a language that requires a translation most people never received.

I went to a good school. And even there, what I learned about image history was almost entirely Western and almost entirely male and just maximum an hour a week. I learned about photography as if it began in Paris and New York. I learned about fashion as if it began on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The entire visual culture of Japan, West Africa, South Asia, Latin America, I discovered almost entirely by accident, years later, through other people and other rabbit holes.

That isn’t a personal failure, more structural really. The education that exists is incomplete, and it is expensive, and it isnt designed for people who are working full-time in a creative industry and have forty-five minutes in the morning before their day begins.

So here is what I built.

I’m calling it The Visual Education. It is a bi-weekly curriculum for paid subscribers — a study guide, arriving every two weeks, covering one idea from image history, fashion theory, or visual culture.

The theory is explained in the document itself, in plain language, not just pointed at. There is always a film or video to watch, an artist to look up, a text to read (with a free link wherever one exists). Each issue takes thirty to forty-five minutes.

It’s defintely not a school! But it is structured like one, in the sense that it has a shape, a sequence, a logic to what comes before and what comes after. And because it lives in a community of paid subscribers, it is something you do alongside other people who are thinking about the same things. You can leave comments. Start discussions. The shared attention is there (or at least I hope so if enough people join)

Season 1 runs sixteen issues across eight months. It covers the female gaze (Berger, Mulvey, bell hooks — and what the theory actually means in a fashion image). The history of fashion photography and how it invented its own visual language. West Africa and the portrait tradition that the West ignored for forty years. Japan and the Provoke movement and why it is in the DNA of everything that feels “raw” in contemporary fashion. Referencing, how to build a visual language instead of just a folder of images. Colour theory. The subculture photograph. And how concepts form.

The first issue is live now. It is called How to Look at an Image. It is built around a single question: who does every photograph assume is looking at it? And what changes when you can see that assumption? The issue includes five lessons: the central idea, the key reading (John Berger’s Ways of Seeing with a link to the free PDF), a film to watch, a comparison of two photographers who worked in the same genre and produced completely opposite gazes, and a prompt to work with. There is also a short quiz at the end.

The second issue, The Female Gaze, will be launched on April 14. From then on, every two weeks new issues are published for you to study.

If you are a paid subscriber, your access link is below at the end of this newsletter. Everything in this curriculum is yours, all published issues, immediately, with new ones arriving every two weeks. You’re not tied to anything and can simply use it for inspiration. Dip in and out when you want. That’s why I decided to built it on a seperate platform that Substack, so I don’t spam the people who don’t want it!

If you are on the free tier: this is what the paid subscription is for. You keep getting everything you already get. Paid subscribers get the curriculum in addition.

One more thing. I am building this as we go. It is a living document, which means it will be shaped, over time, by who is reading it and what they want to go deeper on. If you are a paid subscriber and there is something you want covered, or something that isn’t landing, tell me. The whole point is to actually teach something.

Love,

Zoe

JOIN THE VISUAL CURRICULUM BY CLICKING ON THE BUTTON BELOW

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This post was something I had initially planned to publish earlier this year, but somehow it didn’t get done. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at how the major luxury houses are approaching their visual work, partly because it’s something I find genuinely fascinating, and partly because I think there’s so much in it that applies beyond the big budgets and the heritage names. I work mostly with premium brands rather than heritage houses (although I really want to work for heritage houses, please hire me!), and the gap between those two worlds is smaller than most people think. The thinking translates.

Some of this builds on what I explored in my essay on mass brands using luxury aesthetics, but this time the lens is forward-looking. I think the visual shifts we’re seeing connect to something bigger than fashion: a cultural exhaustion with frictionless digital perfection, and a quiet longing for things that feel specifically human, specifically made, and specifically rooted in something. That current is running through all eight of these observations.

This post is pure speculation and observation, I’m not a trend forecaster or fortune teller!

1. The Directorial Eye Is Back — And It’s Replacing the Runway Entirely

Sofia Coppola’s “LOVE Unlimited” campaign for Cartier last October is a good example of something broader that’s been building. She brought Jacob Elordi into nostalgic, vintage-tinted vignettes shot across New York, and what made it work wasn’t that it looked cinematic, it’s that it felt like a scene from a film you already loved. The jewellery almost felt incidental, which, paradoxically, made it feel so desirable.

But the real watershed moment happened at Milan Fashion Week in September 2025, when Gucci replaced the runway show entirely with a short film. “The Tiger”, co-directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn, became the vehicle for Demna’s debut collection. The cast wasn’t models on a catwalk, it was Demi Moore, Edward Norton, Elliot Page, Keke Palmer, and Ed Harris acting in a story about a fictional Gucci matriarch whose birthday dinner spirals into surreal, psychedelic unravelling. The clothes were embedded in character, in narrative, in emotion. You experienced the collection the way you experience a film: by feeling it first.

Gucci didn’t just borrow cinema’s language, they actually became cinema. A screenplay by Jonze and Reijn, cinematography by Jasper Wolf, a score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer. It premiered in Milan, screened at Cinema Village in New York the next day, and then travelled to Manila months later. The collection has a shelf life that a fifteen-minute runway show could never give it.

Xavier Dolan’s earlier direction of Gucci’s SS25 “Where Light Finds Us” campaign was pointing in this direction, a cinematic narrative set in a dimly-lit apartment, art directed by Riccardo Zanola. But “The Tiger” takes it from direction to total authorship.

What’s different now isn’t necessarily that directors are being hired. It’s the completeness of creative control and the willingness to let narrative override product. In a culture of scroll fatigue, a 30-minute film that asks something of its audience is a radical proposition.

What art directors can take from this: Before your next shoot, write a one-paragraph scene description as if you were writing a screenplay. Describe the emotional state of the person in the frame, not just what they’re wearing. Think about what happens one second before and one second after the shutter fires. That’s the directorial eye, and you don’t need a Spike Jonze budget to apply it.

2. The Archive Has Become Creative Currency

In a world where fast fashion can replicate the surface of luxury within weeks, the one thing that genuinely cannot be faked is a long, documented, specific history of making things.

Bottega Veneta under Matthieu Blazy provided the clearest example. For the 50th anniversary of the Intrecciato weave, Jack Davison shot “Craft is Our Language”, connecting the house’s visual identity to Bruno Munari’s 1963 design handbook. The cast, Julianne Moore, Tyler the Creator, Zadie Smith, Lorenzo Musetti, each represent mastery in a specific discipline. The message wasn’t “look at our heritage.” It was “we belong to a longer tradition of craft and thought than fashion alone.”

Then Bottega released “What Are Dreams” with Duane Michals, a photographer who had shot a campaign for the house back in 1985. Bringing Michals back was a demonstration of continuity, proof that the brand’s visual identity has a through-line extending across four decades. That’s what archival thinking does when it’s done well: it creates a sense of creative DNA rather than creative trend-chasing.

Now, under new creative director Louise Trotter, Bottega’s Summer 2026 campaign, shot by Juergen Teller across Venice, at the Giardini Napoleonici and Palazzo Contarini Polignac, carries this forward. The Campana bag, a reimagined 2004 archival silhouette, demonstrates how archive is the actual product strategy.

Loewe has taken a similar approach: still lifes of archival items including century-old bronze stamps used to engrave leather, positioning craft objects as visual narratives. Now, as Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez celebrate the brand’s 180th anniversary with the Amazona 180 bag, the archival thread continues as a structural principle.

What art directors can take from this: If you work with a brand that has any history at all, even five years, find the thread. Look at the earliest campaigns, the original brand materials. The exercise isn’t about recreating old work. But you could be identifying what was true about the brand before it became polished. And when Bottega connects to Bruno Munari, they’re positioning themselves within an intellectual lineage that elevates the entire project. That kind of thinking is available to everyone, regardless of budget.

3. The Deliberate Rejection of AI Is Becoming a Luxury Position

This one feels important and slightly uncomfortable to write about, because the discourse around AI in creative industries is so noisy. But something genuinely interesting is happening at the luxury level.

In August 2025, Guess ran an ad in Vogue US featuring two AI-generated models. The TikTok backlash was immediate, viewers felt it was fundamentally at odds with what fashion imagery represents: real bodies, real clothes, real creative collaboration. At the same time, Hermès hired a living artist to create hand-drawn illustrations for their website, the first time illustrations had appeared on hermès.com. In an era where everyone experiments with generative tools, Hermès invested in human craft as a statement.

Prada’s SS26 campaign “Image of an Image”, released January 2026, takes this further. Artist Anne Collier created physical still-life compositions with hands holding printed campaign images against coloured backdrops, a meta-commentary on the image itself. Shot by Oliver Hadlee Pearch, featuring Carey Mulligan, Hunter Schafer, and musician John Glacier, the campaign is layered with human intervention at every stage. There’s no way to automate what Collier does. The humanity is the content.

What’s emerging is a split. Some brands use AI pragmatically, Etro leaned into a fully AI-generated campaign with digital artist Silvia Badalotti for SS24. Others are turning the rejection of AI into brand identity. Consumer research supports the latter in luxury: labelling something “AI-generated” makes brands feel less exclusive. In a moment where AI can generate almost anything, the rare thing, the expensive thing, is the demonstrably human.

What art directors can take from this: For premium and luxury clients, being able to say “this was made entirely by human hands” is becoming a genuine differentiator. Consider how you can make the human process visible, the way Collier makes the physical act of holding a photograph part of Prada’s campaign. The hand in the frame is the statement made.

4. Casting Is Doing More Intellectual Work Than Ever

What’s changing now the why over the who appears in luxury campaigns. The casting itself has become the editorial argument. And in a culture that’s increasingly lonely and fragmented, the faces we choose to show carry more emotional weight than they used to. People are looking for recognition, and not just some celebrity aspiration.

The casting story I keep coming back to is Bhavitha Mandava at Chanel. An architecture student from Hyderabad studying at NYU, she was spotted on a New York subway platform by a modelling scout. Within two weeks she was cast for Bottega Veneta’s SS25 show. Then, in December 2025, she became the first Indian model to open a Chanel runway, for Blazy’s Métiers d’Art collection, in an abandoned Bowery subway station, the same area where she’d been discovered just over a year earlier.

That’s storytelling through casting. The narrative is embedded in the choice itself. Blazy’s 80-model all-female cast representing American archetypes and contemporary New York identity, including models over 40 and 50, communicates his philosophy of “democracy, diversity, and dressing up.” Mandava has since been named a Chanel house ambassador, this is structural, and not simply seasonal casting. She’s not a celebrity, but a freshly discovered face that became synonymous with the brand.

Jonathan Anderson’s first coed Dior campaign, shot by David Sims, casts Greta Lee alongside Kylian Mbappé and Sunday Rose, “style as behaviour rather than aspectacle.” Miu Miu’s “On Cloud Nine” for SS26, shot by Jamie Hawkesworth and art directed by Christopher Simmonds, mixes Olivia Rodrigo (her first major fashion campaign) with French indie actress Suzanne Lindon and emerging face Rachel Agbonze. You can’t predict who’s in the frame, which makes you look longer.

Valentino’s Cruise 2026 “Nocturne”, directed by Renell Medrano, features Dakota Johnson, Tate McRae, artist Anne Imhof, musician Dev Hynes, and ballet dancer Devon Teuscher — five entirely different creative worlds. They’re shown relaxing and simply existing. The luxury is in the company, and not just the clothes itself.

What art directors can take from this: Ask yourself what each person in the frame represents beyond how they look. The Mandava story tells us that the best casting often comes from paying attention to the world around you, not just model agencies. The subway platform, the café, the bookshop. Surprise is what makes someone stop scrolling.

5. The Return to Analog Texture Is Real, Stop Calling it Nostalgia!

It’s easy to dismiss this as a trend cycle, everyone shoots a roll of Portra 400, then goes back to digital. But what’s happening now feels structurally different, driven by the same longing for things that bear the trace of a physical process.

The house that’s committed most visibly is Saint Laurent. Under Anthony Vaccarello, analog texture is baked into the brand’s visual identity at every level. Henrik Purienne’s “Shades of Summer” campaign was drenched in 1970s film grain and warm coastal light. Glen Luchford’s black-and-white menswear work uses the specific tonal range of film to create something that feels like a document.

But it goes far beyond campaigns. Saint Laurent has collaborated with Daido Moriyama in the past, the Japanese photographer whose grainy, out-of-focus work is practically a manifesto for the beauty of imperfection. They launched a collaboration with Lomography. They mounted “Self 07”, a photography exhibition with six Magnum Photos photographers shown simultaneously in six cities. Jesse Glazzard’s grainy self-portraits were exhibited at Saint Laurent Rive Droite stores. They even established a film production subsidiary, backing features by David Cronenberg and Paolo Sorrentino. This isn’t dabbling. This is analog authorship as brand pillar!

In my essay on what makes an image feel expensive, I wrote about cognitive fluency. There’s a paradox: visible grain, slight colour shifts, or an imperfect focus plane can feel more expensive than a flawless digital capture, because the imperfection signals a human hand, a physical process, a decision that can’t be undone. In a post-AI landscape, that signal is becoming the ultimate luxury marker.

What art directors can take from this: Notice that Saint Laurent’s analog commitment isn’t one campaign — it’s a system running through exhibitions, collaborations, retail, and film production. That’s the difference between grain as a filter and grain as a philosophy. Introduce physical processes into your workflow, even small ones. Polaroids, scanned textures, rephotographed prints. Material specificity that makes the work feel like it was made somewhere, by someone.

6. Still Life Is Becoming Brand Philosophy

Still life has historically been the less glamorous side of fashion image-making. The product shot. The thing you do without a model budget. But something has shifted.

What’s new is that luxury houses are using still life not just to show product but to articulate a worldview. When Loewe photographs a handbag next to a century-old bronze stamp, the proximity creates meaning. The object is placed in an intellectual context, not just a commercial one.

Celine’s SS26 campaign under new creative director Michael Rider, shot by Zoë Ghertner, does something subtle here. The product shots, structured coats, statement eyewear, the new Celine Luggage “Smile” edition, are given the same weight and visual intelligence as the portraits. The product isn’t secondary in the story, but it’s presented with the same care you’d give a face.

The deeper shift is philosophical. When a brand invests in extraordinary still life, it’s saying: this object is worth contemplating on its own. It doesn’t need a celebrity to justify your attention. That confidence is rare, and it reads as expensive in the way I described in my framework: the decision is visible, but the effort is not.

What art directors can take from this: Think of each product shot as a portrait of the object. What is its character? What should it be near, and what should it not be near? The brands winning at still life now treat every product shot as an opportunity to communicate philosophy, not just function.

7. The Quiet Luxury Visual Language Is Fracturing

Quiet luxury, muted colours, understated design, no visible logos, was the dominant aesthetic conversation for the past few years (and honestly it was fading, but now with Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr love story airing, it creeped its way back in!). Loro Piana, Brunello Cucinelli, The Row. Over 60% of high-income shoppers now favour “quality-over-quantity” buying behaviours. But the aesthetic is starting to split, and I think it tells us something about where we are culturally: the period of collective retreat into quiet, safe, understated everything is ending.

On one side, quiet luxury is deepening into what I’d call the “provenance era.” Status defined by vintage sourcing, bespoke tailoring, transparent supply chains. The Row’s 2025 valuation of over $1 billion shows this has serious commercial momentum.

On the other side, there’s a counter-movement toward boldness. Fall 2026 at Paris Fashion Week showed graphic face prints, dramatic hats, oversized bows, and tomato reds, designers reasserting personality after years of restraint. The codes of understated wealth have become too legible, too widespread. When everyone speaks quiet luxury, quiet luxury stops functioning as a signal.

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut is the case study. An entire solar system inside the Grand Palais for SS26. Métiers d’Art in a New York subway station. That’s operatic, but operatic in service of craft and vision. Alessandro Michele’s Valentino pushes similarly: 130+ looks of ruffled dresses, clashing colours, and exaggerated layering at the 17th-century Villa Parisi. This is maximalism with emotional depth. The campaign centres on vulnerability and community support, rejecting self-sufficiency as a value. In a moment of cultural loneliness, Michele is arguing that needing other people, and showing it, is the new luxury.

What art directors can take from this: Don’t treat “quiet” as the default luxury direction. The question isn’t “how do we make this feel quiet?” but “what is the appropriate volume for this brand and audience?” For some clients, reintroducing colour, drama, and intensity is the most radical move right now. The real skill is calibrating volume to intention.

8. The Line Between Editorial, Commercial, and Cinema Is Gone

This final prediction is the most structural. The distinction between editorial, commercial, and cinematic work has functionally dissolved. Look at the past few months alone: Gucci replaced the runway with a Spike Jonze film. Saint Laurent established a film production subsidiary. Prada invited an artist to create conceptual still lifes that are simultaneously advertising and gallery work. Versace split its SS26 campaign across three photographers; Steven Meisel, Frank Lebon, and Tania Franco Klein, each with entirely different visual vocabularies.

Miu Miu’s “On Cloud Nine”, art directed by Christopher Simmonds, shot by Jamie Hawkesworth, styled by Lotta Volkova, creates aerial scenes with shifting skies, rose pink, warm gold, shades of blue, with ocean and treetops visible below. It’s neither editorial nor commercial. It’s something that doesn’t need those labels.

Loewe’s first campaign under McCollough and Hernandez, shot by Talia Chetrit, outdoor sunlight emphasising skin against leather, described as “confident, playful, sun-drenched.” Editorial in its intimacy, commercial in its clarity, cinematic in its light. The categories don’t help anymore.

Culturally, this makes sense. Gen Z, projected to represent 75% of luxury consumers by 2026, don’t distinguish between entertainment, advertising, and art. They experience it all in the same scroll, with the same thumb. If your campaign belongs to one category only, it will feel outdated to the audience that matters most.

What art directors can take from this: Stop thinking in categories. When you approach a commercial brief, bring editorial instincts: specificity of feeling, casting that serves an idea. When you approach editorial, bring commercial discipline: clarity, consistency, awareness of where images will live. The art directors who operate fluidly across all registers are the ones building the most sustained authority.

A Final Thought

Something connects all eight of these observations: luxury imagery is shifting from showing to arguing. The campaigns generating the most cultural impact are visual arguments about what matters: craft, time, human authorship, who gets to be seen, what it means to make something when almost anything can be generated.

Whether it’s Gucci making a short film, Saint Laurent collaborating with Lomography, or Prada inviting an artist to physically hold a photograph, the message is the same. The human is the luxury. And for those of us working with premium brands, that’s genuinely exciting. Because the argument doesn’t require a hundred-year archive or a multi-million-euro budget. It requires clarity of thought, specificity of vision, and the discipline to make every image say something you actually believe.

I’d love to hear what you’re noticing. What shifts are you seeing in the luxury space that I’ve missed? Drop it in the comments.

Love, Zoe

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Hi everyone,

There is a version of being “informed” in this industry that is, in practice, a form of delay. Scrolling editorial coverage, tracking campaign releases, following the accounts of people whose taste you admire, all of this is reactive. When I met in London for a lovely lunch in January, she mentioned ‘research procrastination’, and it has been on my mind ever since. It seemed to feel like the answer to my creative block at the time. I had been stepping away from agency work for a while to focus on developing my own projects with more control and signature, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I just had research procrastination issues.

I felt like I was going to find the answer to my creative block in being inspired by cool things others were doing, that ideas would pop into my mind if I looked deep enough. But it was never about looking deep or for more, it was about looking sideways that got me inspired and thinking about what type of visuals I want to create today.

Doing research and wanting to be in the know if what’s currently happening tells you what has already happened, dressed in the present tense. The art directors who operate ahead of the curve are not simply faster at consuming the same information we all have access to. Their brains don’t work more quickly or reactively. They have built a fundamentally different relationship with how ideas move through culture, and that relationship begins well outside the fashion industry itself. Of course doing research into what is now is good, but don’t get too carried away with it.

This in-depth essay explores what this looks like in real-life practice. It highlights how methods like reading, research habits, intellectual frameworks, and professional instincts come together to distinguish an art director who truly shapes visual culture from one who simply reflects it expertly.

1. Read outside the industry, but no seriously!

The visual ideas that feel genuinely new in fashion almost never originate in fashion. They travel and have travelled far. They begin somewhere in architecture, philosophy, anthropology, cinema theory, political history, and they arrive on a runway or in a campaign months or years later, often unacknowledged. Understanding where ideas come from gives you access to them before that translation has been made.

Roland Barthes wrote Mythologies in 1957, and it remains one of the most practically useful books an image-maker can own. It’s not a book about fashion, or even about images specifically, the subject is about how objects, gestures, and photographs acquire cultural meaning that exceeds their literal function. When you understand that mechanism, you stop reading campaigns at face value and start reading them as arguments. Susan Sontag’s On Photography does something similar, it offers the sharpest existing framework for understanding how images construct reality instead of just documenting it. These are all very structural reads. The art director who has genuinely absorbed them thinks differently about every brief they receive.

A reference only becomes useful when you understand the conditions that produced it.

Good literary writing teaches image-making in ways that are difficult to articulate but easy to feel. W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer and scholar, is one of the best examples of this. His work is melancholic, associative, and deeply researched, and it never shows off. Meaning accumulates slowly, through proximity and patience.

2. Study advertising history as seriously as fashion history

Most art directors in fashion know runway history reasonably well. Far fewer know advertising history with the same depth, and that gap is an advantage waiting to be claimed. I also sometimes find myself to be this way, because my love for fashion initially drew me to this career before even understanding the different roles. This, of course, also counts if you’re an art director in any other industry. The campaigns that shaped visual culture over the past sixty years, such as Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan, Helmut Newton’s work across the 1970s and 80s, the early Bartle Bogle Hegarty years, Oliviero Toscani for Benetton, are not simply historical references. They should be seen as case studies in how image-makers used provocation, narrative, and psychological intelligence to produce work that lasted and that moved culture. The ones that went against the grain at their time and didn’t simply follow trends.

What made Bourdin’s work transgressive was not the imagery in isolation, but the understanding that desire and unease are not opposing forces in a viewer, but the same one. What made Toscani’s Benetton campaigns matter was not the controversy they generated, but the clarity of the intellectual position that produced them. Understanding the thinking behind the image is what makes history useful. Anyone can pull a Bourdin reference. Very few people can articulate what it would mean to apply his logic to a brief today.

There is also something important in studying how advertising history handled the relationship between image and commerce, and how certain image-makers managed to serve a commercial function while producing work of genuine cultural weight. That tension never disappeared, even when it feels like it sometimes.. If anything it has intensified. The art directors who navigate it best are the ones who understand that it is not a contradiction to be resolved but a productive friction to be worked with.

3. Understand Context Before You Reference

The reason so much mood-boarded work feels hollow is that it lifts the surface of an image without understanding what produced it. Context is NEVER background information. It IS the image. The reason Helmut Newton’s photographs carry the charge they do is inseparable from second-wave feminism and the specific social anxieties of the 1970s...

The rest of this essay is for subscribers.

Five more sections on the research habits, competitive advantages, and intellectual frameworks that separate reactive image-making from genuine cultural leadership.

• Why your offline research practice is your most valuable professional asset

• How to read cultural mood before it has been named

• What adjacent industries tell you that fashion won’t

• How to reframe every brief from an aesthetic problem to a cultural one

• Building a visual theory — what it is, and why it’s the only thing that compounds

all essays, frameworks, and the full archive.

As a paid subscriber, you also get access to the full Idea to Issue course, the 30-day Art Directors DNA, an Art Director’s Outreach Playbook with 8 templates and theory, and 250+ posts in the archive, full of industry insights, art direction techniques, essays, and visual inspiration.

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Today I want to talk about a topic everyone has run into at least 100 times in their creative career. Again, one that took me a lot of research and thought to put this framework together. I’ve had many of the deeper-thinking posts this month sit in my drafts for quite a while, and because January/beginning of Feb has been downtime for many freelancers, I was finally able to put this into words.

There is a phrase that moves through creative briefings, client feedback, and post-shoot reviews more than almost any other. It needs to feel expensive. (Ironically, they never pair it with a budget that seems that way either lol). You hear it said with confidence, as though it is a clear direction. As though everyone in the room understands the same thing. As though expensive is a colour you can simply dial up.

We don't truly understand it as a direction, instead, it’s more akin to a feeling. Interestingly, feelings have a very specific structure.

When people use that word, they are actually referring to something closer to psychological authority, a visual quality that demands nothing from the viewer because it assumes everything. The image doesn’t need to explain itself or persuade. It exists with a certain stillness that, even before reason or language intervene, signals that it's worth noticing. It suggests careful creation and intentional intent.

Understanding how that signal is built is one of the most strategically valuable skills an art director can develop, because it rarely relates to budget.

The Psychology Behind the Perception

There is a concept in psychology called cognitive fluency, it’s the ease with which our brains process what we see. Research consistently shows that we associate ease of processing with truth, familiarity, and quality. When something is visually coherent, when there’s nothing jarring or competing, the brain reads it as safe, trustworthy, and refined.

Expensive-looking work tends to have high cognitive fluency. This isn’t because it’s simple, but because every element earns its place. There’s no residue. Nothing that makes the eye snag. The visual decisions feel inevitable instead, which the brain then registers as authority.

This is different from minimalism, which is often misread as the path to perceived luxury. Minimalism is a formal choice. Cognitive fluency is an effect. You can have a maximalist image that feels extraordinarily expensive, think Loewe’s Pre-collection 2023 shot by Juergen Teller, layered and lo-fi and strange but utterly coherent, because everything within it follows an internal logic. And you can have a sparse, stripped-back image that reads as cheap because the emptiness feels accidental rather than intentional.

The distinction matters enormously in practice.

The Role of Restraint in Colour

Colour is often the most emotionally powerful and least understood tool in an art director’s toolkit. Naturally, people tend to choose black and white when they want to create a sense of sophistication and communicate ‘expensive’. This approach can be very effective, but it’s also a bit of a shortcut that might become a crutch if relied on too much.

What really gives colour a sense of luxury isn’t just the palette itself, but the gentle colours tend to be subtle, not necessarily pale, but quietly harmonious between the shades. Eleconfident. The tones don’t clash, instead, they blend seamlessly. It feels like someone thoughtfully made these choices, which is a more delicate and refined process than it might seem at first glance.

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As a paid subscriber, you also get access to the full Idea to Issue course, the 30-day Art Directors DNA, an Art Director’s Outreach Playbook with 8 templates and theory, and 250+ posts in the archive, full of industry insights, art direction techniques, essays, and visual inspiration.

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Happy Sunday. I enjoy using the chat on Substack to steer conversations toward inspiration and toward people helping each other out. Last Sunday, I asked the question, ‘What's a film you think every art director should have seen? Not for the obvious reasons, and there were so many replies. I looked up each film to see which ones to add to my…

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Hi everyone,

Today I’m sharing a piece of exclusive course content I’ve been building and refining for the past two years. The Strategic Art Direction Program sold out within two weeks of launching, with the next round planned for summer and a growing waitlist. I wasn’t planning to reopen anything until then.

But because it’s my birthday, and because so many of you asked if there was any way to still join, I decided to do two things.

First, I’m sharing this guide with my paid subscribers.
Second, I’ve opened a small handful of additional spots to the current 8-week program. Grab one now, the course only runs 3 times a year.

Claim one of the spots here!

Inside the program, I share everything I’ve learned from working across agencies, brands, campaigns, strategy decks, and image research. It’s where I go beyond surface-level advice and get specific about how this industry actually works.

One of the things I’ve been quietly mapping over the past two years is how often “Art Director” is used as a catch-all title.

On job boards, inside brands, within tech companies, publishing houses, cultural institutions, and startups, the title shows up everywhere, but not in the actual job title. Sometimes it’s campaign-led. Sometimes it’s strategic. Sometimes it sits inside research or product development. But they are all art direction.

So I started documenting them.

What you’ll see below are 110 roles that are, in essence, art direction. Some are niche. Some are broad. Some are highly commercial. Others are cultural or research-driven.

I personally work across several of these lanes while simply calling myself “Art Director.” The title gives me flexibility. But if you’re navigating a career shift, trying to understand where you fit, or looking to monetise your visual thinking more strategically, seeing the nuance can change everything.

Maybe you’re already in an industry where art direction skills overlap with what you do. Maybe you want to move closer to creative leadership. Maybe you’re realising the opportunities are far wider than traditional fashion campaigns. Or you are currently wanting to switch careers, or are heavily applying for jobs and feel like you are running out of options.

That’s what this guide is for.

Below, you’ll find the breakdown.

As a paid subscriber, you also get access to the full Idea to Issue course, the 30-day Art Directors DNA, and 250+ posts in the archive, full of industry insights, art direction techniques, essays, and visual inspiration.

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Hi everyone,

Hope you’re well. The end of February is nearly there, which I think is a time when the industry is getting up to speed again, and more freelance jobs are appearing. It’s also almost my birthday, and it’s looking like it will be sunny for once! So things are good, as a Feb 25th baby in the Netherlands, my birthday isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, because it always rains, but this year might be different.

I want to start today’s newsletter with something I noticed on a recent project for a completely new kind of client. I was putting together a reference deck for a campaign brief, and about halfway through, I realised almost everything I had saved was already familiar. I had seen variations of all of it before, not necessarily because I lack taste, but it was because I had been pulling from the same ecosystem of circulating images in a short timeframe. The references were technically strong. But they weren’t mine and didn’t have my stamp on them as an art director.

That moment made me think seriously about what research actually means in 2026, when the volume of images being produced and consumed is unlike anything the industry has seen before. We are living through an era of what researcher Kate Crawford has described as ‘aesthetic flattening’ — a condition where everyone is drawing from the same water. And the more saturated the image landscape becomes, the more your research practice is what either sets you apart or keeps you running in place.

This essay is about that. About what genuine research looks like, what it builds in you over time, and why it might be the most important creative skill nobody talks about seriously enough.

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We Are Living Through a Visual Sameness Crisis

I can’t stress it enough, honestly. Image culture in 2026 has a real problem, and it is not a lack of images, but what it actually is, is an excess of the same ones (or endless variations). AI generation has accelerated production to a point where technically polished visuals are now near-infinite and near-free. Social platforms have optimised so precisely for engagement that the images that surface are, almost by definition, already proven to resonate with existing taste. The result is a feedback loop that rewards familiarity and quietly punishes originality.

For art directors, photographers, and creative directors working in this landscape, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that it has never been easier to make work that looks competent but says nothing. The opportunity is that work with a genuine, research-backed point of view has never been more visible by contrast, because it is so rare.

The creatives who are building real authority right now are not the ones producing the most content. They are the ones whose work has a specific visual intelligence behind it, one that comes from a research practice with actual depth. You can feel the difference immediately. There is a quality to work built on genuine inquiry that is hard to articulate but very easy to recognise.

The Difference Between Collecting and Thinking

I spent a very long time believing I was doing research when I was actually just collecting. There is a meaningful gap between the two and I think a lot of creatives are in it without realising.

Collecting is saving images because they are beautiful, because the mood is right, because they might be useful someday. It is passive. It lets the image speak without asking it any questions. A folder of thousands of saved images is evidence of a good eye, but it is not a research practice, it’s a database.

Research is when the act of looking starts producing ideas. You are making connections across unrelated fields, noticing patterns, and building a visual argument. You find a photograph in a 1970s Italian architecture magazine, and it changes how you think about negative space on a brief you’ve been stuck on for two weeks. You read a paragraph from a Susan Sontag essay on photography and suddenly the casting direction for a project you couldn’t articulate becomes clear. The research is not feeding the work, it is the work.

The shift between the two has less to do with what you look at and more to do with the rigour you bring to it. Slowing down. Taking notes. Asking what an image is actually doing rather than just whether you respond to it emotionally. This is the habit that builds a creative practice with longevity.

Where Distinctive Research Actually Lives

The images that carry genuine creative authority tend to come from sources that haven’t yet been absorbed into the industry’s shared visual language. The moment a reference enters the mood board canon is the moment it starts appearing across multiple decks and inspiration posts, and it starts producing a particular kind of sameness.

This is why I have become increasingly drawn to sources that live outside fashion’s own archive. I’m still learning, and also learning to be more interested. Because I’ve had a love for fashion, magazines and all that since I was young, but I also love looking at other aspects and relating them back. Architecture monographs. Scientific illustration from the 1960s. Food photography from mid-century cookbooks. Industrial catalogues made for function. Instruction manuals. Vintage science fiction. These visual languages were developed entirely independently of fashion, which means they bring something to a brief that fashion references alone cannot.

Short shameless plug. Follow the ART DIRECTION LIBRARY, my second Substack, where I share scans, old editorials, vintage campaigns and analysis on visual culture and the zeitgeist if you want some regular inspiration. These are all images that are not, or are rare to find online.

Physical sources have become essential to my process. Bookshops, secondhand magazine stores, and print archives that have never been digitised. There is something important about encountering an image that exists only in a physical object — one that has not been scanned, tagged, uploaded, or circulated. It is, by definition, less contaminated by the image ecosystem everyone else is pulling from. When I bring a reference like that into a creative conversation, it opens things up in a way that a Pinterest image never quite does.

Films are another rich territory, particularly the ones that have not yet been absorbed into fashion’s reference pool. The cinematography in Agnes Varda’s early documentary work. The production design in Eastern European cinema from the 1980s was characterised by creative constraints that produced genuinely strange and beautiful solutions. The costume logic in films that were never prestigious enough to be widely referenced. These are visual languages with real ideas in them, and most creatives working today have never looked at them at all.

Research as a Way of Seeing

What I have come to understand is that research is not just a preparatory step before the real creative work begins. It is the practice that builds your eye over time.

Every serious image-maker I have learned from, through their work, their interviews, their monographs, has a research practice that feeds directly into the visual intelligence of what they make. Wolfgang Tillmans speaks about sequencing images by intuition, a method that only works if your archive is rich enough to generate genuine surprise. Lynne Ramsay builds film references from sound cues, old magazine scans, and postcards collected from junk shops, they are objects that hold atmosphere rather than instructions. The result in both cases is a body of work that feels like it comes from a specific interior world rather than from a shared external one.

This is what research builds in you when you commit to it seriously. It develops a subconscious visual language like a set of instincts, references, and connections that are genuinely yours. On set, this shows up in the decisions that happen quickly: the frame you move to instinctively, the object you reach for, the casting quality you recognise immediately. These instincts don’t come from nowhere. They come from the accumulated depth of what you have actually looked at and thought about.

A creative with a deep research practice makes better decisions faster. They have more to draw on. They are less dependent on the brief to tell them what an image should feel like, because they already have a sense of what they believe images can do. Ever since this realisation I’ve made it my dedicated practice to keep researching and taking the step to more authorship over my work to understand what my style is. Each thing I read, project I do or decision I make is a step closer.

What Research Builds Over Time

In a climate where AI can generate a technically competent image from a prompt in seconds, the question of what human creative intelligence actually offers has become urgent. I think the answer is a point of view, a specific way of seeing that has been built through years of genuine inquiry, real-world experience, and research that goes beyond what an algorithm can surface.

This is the long game. It doesn’t pay off immediately, but it compounds. Over months and years, a genuine research practice builds a visual signature that shows up consistently across your work. Clients begin to recognise it. The right collaborations start to come. The work starts to feel like it belongs to a body of thinking instead of a series of individual briefs.

I am still building mine. I have deliberately been expanding my research into non-Western image archives, such as the independent magazine culture of Japan in the 1990s, studio portrait photography from my home town, and zine culture from communities whose visual histories were never widely preserved or digitised. There are entire visual languages that the dominant image industry has largely overlooked, and they are extraordinary. Finding them requires effort, going to libraries, seeking out physical archives, and looking beyond the collections that have been made easily available online. But that effort is exactly what makes them useful.

A Few Things Worth Starting With

Build at least one non-visual research source into your next project. A text, a film, a conversation with someone working in a completely different field. Notice what it changes about the brief. Sometimes I like to reference a song next to my moodboard, so the clients get the vibe better.

Keep written notes alongside your image research. Not captions, but actual observations about what something is doing and why it holds your attention. The act of writing forces articulation that images alone let you skip, and articulated ideas are far more useful in a brief than collected ones.

Spend time with images that create friction — the ones you can’t immediately place, that resist easy categorisation. That mild disorientation is usually a sign that your thinking is being stretched in a direction it hasn’t been before.

And pay attention to what keeps reappearing across your archive over time. The recurring motifs, the specific qualities of light or mood or gesture you are consistently drawn to. These patterns are your visual intelligence making itself visible. They are worth understanding.

The real archive is your eye. And your eye is built entirely by the depth and quality of what you have taken the time to actually look at.

In 2026, that is the creative advantage that genuinely matters.

I would love to know where your most interesting research comes from, such as the sources that have genuinely changed how you see. Drop them in the comments.

Love,

Zoë

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Hi everyone,

I just got back from a couple of days in Spain where I disconnected. I’m currently still catching up on emails, but very excited to have finalised this draft I’ve worked on for a while.

Fashion Week happens twice a year, and every time it does, the entire industry recalibrates at once. Colours surface across cities, silhouettes echo each other, it’s the time where new faces appear on the runway, beauty direction gets updated and certain moods take over while some ‘old trends’ are declared over. Art directors, stylists, and photographers are expected to move quickly within that rhythm because we often work a season or even a year ahead. Briefs come in with compressed timelines and research can be stressful.

Over the past few years, I have built a system that allows me to work fast without rushing, to build narratives without scrambling, and to move through references with clarity because I am already tracking what matters. When people say I work quickly, what they are really responding to is preparation. I am never reacting in the moment or starting research from scratch. Fashion week is the time where I build a research file that has been structured in advance.

(I know fashion week already started, but I wanted to make sure this post has enough structure to publish).

If you want access to the full system, including how I turn runway themes into editorial narratives, how I track casting strategically, and how I prepare for briefs months before they arrive, then upgrade below. This guide is equally valuable for art directors, stylists, and photographers who want to operate ahead of the curve.

When you upgrade you will also gain access to an archive of 200+ posts full of insights, inspiration and education. Including in-depth essays, art direction techniques, libraries and resources and industry insights. Paid subscribers also get access to the from Idea to Issue course and 30 days to build your Art Director’s DNA.

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