July 2026
July Issue
A July edit moving between garment and image: surreal fashion objects at the V&A, portraiture as performance at the National Portrait Gallery, East London programmes built through community, and campaigns that treat the city, the body and the crowd as active collaborators.
01 — Art
A London-facing edit for photography, portraiture, contemporary art and image culture.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
The V&A’s Schiaparelli exhibition traces the designer’s 1920s origins through the house’s contemporary Daniel Roseberry era, placing fashion beside surrealist art, photography, illustration and object culture. It is a precise July anchor for anyone thinking about how garments become images before they become clothes.
Why it matters visually: It connects fashion, portraiture, display design and surrealist visual language, with Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Schiaparelli archive pieces and contemporary couture in the same visual field.
Book ticketsMarilyn Monroe: A Portrait
Built around Monroe’s centenary, this exhibition studies a public image made through collaboration with photographers, artists and stylists. The National Portrait Gallery foregrounds agency as much as iconography, moving from early pin-ups to Warhol, Boty, Avedon, Beaton, Eve Arnold and Sam Shaw.
Why it matters visually: It is a compact study in how celebrity portraiture is built through gaze, repetition, authorship, styling and the delicate politics of being looked at.
Book ticketsBackyard Biennial: East
Whitechapel Gallery’s first Backyard Biennial is a free, eight-week programme with more than 40 local partners. Its East edition spans exhibitions, screenings, workshops, residencies, walks, open studios and commissions, with photography, film, textiles and community archives woven through the programme.
Why it matters visually: It treats image-making as part of place: East London’s textiles, migration histories, artist studios, community archives, film culture and public space all become visual material.
View programmeHerbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026
The National Portrait Gallery’s annual portrait award gathers contemporary painted portraits selected from international submissions. The 2026 display offers a useful counterpoint to photography: close observation, likeness, surface and sitter psychology slowed down through paint rather than captured through lens time.
Why it matters visually: For photographers, painted portraiture sharpens questions of pose, scale, intimacy, expression and what a face can hold after the instant has passed.
View exhibitionThe Process Room
The Process Room brings together alternative photographic processes, photobook publishing, zine-making, sustainability, archives and community-led practice. Its workshops and talks centre making by hand, from cyanotype and plant-based experiments to bookbinding, independent publishing and the small social rituals around printed images.
Why it matters visually: It is a reminder that photographic culture is also tactile: paper, folding, printing, binding, chemical process and the social life of small editions.
View programme02 — Fashion
A compact visual edit of campaigns, launches and creative direction selected for image-making rather than product noise.
A collection of movement and togetherness
H&M Group’s Solar Club collaboration brings movement, table culture and coastal light into one visual world. The campaign imagery shifts between bodies in motion and bodies gathered around food, which makes the collection feel less like an activewear drop and more like a study of rhythm, leisure and communal styling.
View official source
Fall Winter 2026 precollection campaign
LOEWE’s FW26 precollection is photographed by Talia Chetrit on Tenerife, placing Eva Victor, Levon Hawke, Seydou Sarr and Isla Johnston against volcanic landscape and hard light. The interest is in contrast: vivid textures, leather, sportswear and island terrain held in a deliberately unsettled fashion frame, with bodies reading as part of the terrain rather than separate from it.
View official source
A New York Minute
Balenciaga’s campaign is directed by Celine Song and built as three sixty-second Manhattan films around Sarah Pidgeon, Fall 26 pieces and the Le City, Le 7 Bowling and Rodeo bags. Its best idea is structural: it lets the city, film crew and behind-the-scenes mechanics become part of the fashion image.
View official source03 — On the Field
Studio-facing notes from the live creative ecosystem around Davide Studios.
