Pushing the medium of fashion illustrator: Kelly Beeman

Think fashion illustration is a dying art? Meet NY-based fashion illustrator Kelly Beeman, whose paintings push up against the more expected tropes of the centuries-old medium.

Self-taught artist Kelly started out with nude figure painting, but luckily for her clients, who now include fashion brands J.W.Anderson, Loewe, Tory Burch and Elie Saab, she became interested in clothes as a way to individualise or “dress” her characters. As a result, her work sits between figurative painting and fashion illustration, with fashion becoming not only a way to express the many different personalities of her figures but more widely to look at personal appearance.

Kelly makes monochromatic contour drawings of partially or fully naked male and female characters, which, when viewed as a whole look like a family — each figure with side-parted hair, arched brows and cat-like eyes. Those same facial features run through her paintings, but colour, pattern and setting make the images happily different.