At the intersection of desire and curiosity, the Shop Gallery was born from a conviction: that fashion illustration is not an afterword to fashion, but one of its most intimate languages.

 

The gallery was established in 2009 at Bruton Place, Mayfair, as an extension of Nick Knight’s radical approach to image-making. From the outset, Shop was a space for experimentation. It first housed props from iconic fashion shoots, then expanded to present contemporary art by artists such as the Chapman Brothers, the Gao Brothers, and Claire Morgan. What united these practices was not medium, but intensity: a commitment to visual thinking that exceeds documentation.

 

Fashion illustration entered the gallery’s focus in 2012, prompted by a shift happening elsewhere. While magazines increasingly turned away from illustration, a new generation of illustrators were publishing their work online with urgency and devotion. The gallery’s first fashion illustrator, Rei Nadal, embodied this moment. Supported by SHOWstudio, she travelled to New York, London, Milan, and Paris, illustrating live from the front row as models moved down the runway, and transmitting her sketches directly to the studio in real time.

 

This live, interpretive act mirrors SHOWstudio’s broader DNA: a willingness to rethink how fashion is seen. Across film, digital experimentation, and live content, Nick Knight’s practice has consistently expanded fashion beyond the runway, treating it as an evolving system of ideas.

 

Fashion illustration holds a similar promise. Once central to fashion culture and later sidelined by the rise of photography, illustration offers something photography often cannot: access to the invisible logic of clothes. It captures obsession, distortion, rhythm, and desire as response. It is not merely an image, but a way of knowing and feeling fashion.

 

The gallery champions this language. Valuing illustration as a site where truth-seeking and fantasy coexist. The works we present are one-off, unique pieces, created by illustrators curiosity is inseparable from their drawing.

 

These works assert fashion illustration as a critical, independent artistic practice. Rooted in devotion, immediacy, and conceptual imagination.