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JO RATCLIFFE
JO RATCLIFFE
One of a new generation of creatives who are redefining the look and function of fashion imagery today, the director and illustrator Jo Ratcliffe leads in the field of multi-dimensional media. Her immaculate, instantly-recognisable graphic style adapts to myriad outcomes – not only can she execute meticulous portraits, collaborate on photo-stories, create props or stage spectacular installations, Ratcliffe also devises album concepts for pop stars, invents characters for animators and dreams up logotypes to rebrand fashion companies.
The breadth of this 10-year portfolio has made her incredibly self-sufficient when it comes to directing motion imagery. Whereas most
Biographystudios might employ a designer, an illustrator, a scriptwriter or storyboarder and a director to create an animation, Ratcliffe is unusual in fulfilling every one of these roles whilst maintaining a fashion sensibility. Her films are unique in their ability to bridge the brand aspirations of a luxury client with the technical expertise of a digital animator.
Born in Berkshire, England, Ratcliffe studied painting and printmaking at Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London. There she developed a facility for incorporating illustration into graphics through poster design. Her early editorial work for Dazed & Confused in the early 2000s was marked for its hand-drawn aesthetic, which stood in contrast to that of many of her peers, and their over-reliance on the new Photoshop and Illustrator tools of the period. Commissions for fashion publications such as Visionaire, V and Vogue Nippon followed, and particularly for UK Vogue, to which she remains a regular contributor. These helped Ratcliffe build up strong relationships with photographers such as Inez & Vinoodh and Richard Kern, and also led to projects for a range of commercial clients in the industry, including Levi’s, Edun, Uniqlo, Stussy, Topshop, Möet Chandon and H&M. This work can be extremely diverse in form. In 2010, Ratcliffe designed various identities for Morgans Hotel Group, as well as icons for its iPad App, while in 2011 she was commissioned to make an illustrated tear-up-and-keep tablecloth for a private dinner staged by Louis Vuitton. Her
work for the music industry meanwhile includes Sony’s advertising campaign of early 2000’s, the annual posters for the South by Southwest festival, and in 2010, the cover design and tour imagery for Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream album.
Over the past three years, the shift towards digital and motion imagery in fashion has positioned Ratcliffe at the centre of the most exciting innovations in global media. Currently based in London, she has been working on a burgeoning portfolio of animations and digital projects for fashion’s most prestigious houses. Following a film collaboration with Inez & Vinoodh and Kate Moss for Balmain in 2011, Ratcliffe was chosen to direct the ident announcing the re-launch of the LVMH house of Kenzo; part of a print and animation package reflecting the company’s younger positioning. “Kenzonique’s” colourful montage, featuring Ratcliffe’s signature “walking woman” motif, captured the imagination of the advertising community and earned the short’s inclusion in the Business of Fashion’s Top Ten Fashion Films of the Season.
The trailer’s success has led to further work for LVMH – most recently, “New Now”, a Noirish animé centred on the belts from Louis Vuitton’s S/S ’12 menswear collection.
Biography by Penny Martin
Miller HarrisFragrance illustrations & packaging
Michael KorsValentine’s Day 2016 Gift Guidehttp://en.vogue.fr/fashion-videos/fashion-story/videos/love-story-michael-kors-plays-cupid/21797
SephoraHoliday 2014
Fresh: Rose Face Mask15th Anniversary Special Edition Packaginghttp://www.fresh.com/UK/Fresh-Moments-Jo-Ratcliffe.html
Tory BurchTory A Film by Jo Ratcliffehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH5g7bnrsUo
NikeMade Light to Go Long: Flyknit Lunar 3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwrilctDpOg
Yahoo! StyleHoroscopes
Vogue UKDecember 2012, “Vogue Goes Pop”
PennyblackFall/Winter 2013 Magalog Illustrations
Katy PerryAlbum art for “Teenage Dream” & “The One That Got Away”
TopshopWindow Displays during London Fashion Week
Louis VuittonTable & Menu Illustrations
Jimmy ChooPF15 Capsule Collection with Artist Rafael Mantessohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrkXs9kBVec
Vogue USFashion film opening + ending credits, “Jonnie & Ari”http://vimeo.com/65314191
Flamingo Nightclub, BerlinNeon Signage
Chrome Hearts x Vogue JapanAugust 2014
CR Fashion BookIssue 4, “Fairy Tales”
Ever ManifestoEver Bamboo
Letter WorksHair Alphabet
Character WorkDita von Teese
SXSWNorway at SXSW, 2009-2013
Morgans Hotel GroupIdentities and iPad icons
V MagazineArt direction & collage
V MagazineMay 2013, “About Face”
Lady GagaApplausehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pco91kroVgQ
Isetan x Vogue JapanFall/Winter 2012
Louis VuittonWomen’s Spring-Summer 2013 fashion show, collaboration with Saskia Lawaks
Visionaire#59 Fairytale, photographs by Inez & Vinoodh
The Gentlewoman
SPRING/SUMMER 2013CAROLINE ROUX
Fantastic illustrator Jo Ratcliffe gets set to go, photographed by Paul Wetherell, styled by Hannes Hetta.
The portfolio of super-successful fashion illustrator Jo Ratcliffe is an exuberant affair. Her work for magazines including V Magazine and Vogue Nippon and fashion houses like Kenzo and Jimmy Choo can combine exquisitely hand-drawn explosions of 60’s-style flow-ers in jewel colours with luscious candy-striped backgrounds. The extenuated line-drawn women in her animations stride past fantasy cityscapes and flashes of neon.
“When I started at Central Saint Martins in 1996, my clothing was driven by music,” she says. “The Pixies, the Breeders, the Violent Femmes - it was skaterish, I suppose. I was studying fine art, but my ultimate goal was to have one of my designs on a Hysteric Glamour
T-shirt - do you remember that Japanese streetwear label?” Though they never called, last year Jo designed textiles for Nina Ricci and created animations for Louis Vuitton.”
“I spend all day sitting at a desk in my studio in east London, drawing with my left hand and doing screen work with the right,” says Jo, “so it’s important to wear something functional” Though jewellery is a luxury she enjoys, Jo tends to lose it: “My life is full of single earrings.”
I wouldn’t do as I was told as a child. I spent most of my time drawing, with my left hand, and would draw everything the wrong way around. So if I was handwriting I would handwrite in the opposite way to everybody else and all the words would be backwards. Images actually were the right way around. So it started.
I was living with the art director of a magazine and I just thought of doing some drawing and giving out little bits and pieces to put in the magazine. It was a way of making art work and getting it published that was really low cost.
When I started out, I saw other people making illustrations and having a par-ticular style and it just seemed to me, especially in fashion, it would age very quickly and I didn’t want to find myself falling into that hole. I want to stay current and I want to keep evolving. At the moment, there is a lot of call for
online content moving image and it’s kind of a blank canvas.
I’m really emotional about the things that I make. I get really stressed out and worked up if things don’t start to look the way that I want them to - and animation has brought the biggest learning curve. The Balmain one was probably the one I can remember the most because I just knew noth-ing about animation. I remember sitting outside a shop in a car some of the time, I was just looking through these emails and I had 4 weeks. I knew nothing about it. I knew it would be with Inez and Vinoodh and Kate Moss so I knew if I made a mistake, it was going to be very public. But it was kind of a crash course in education.
There is nothing like being able to make your drawings come alive. It’s not just about that. It is about being able to give life from so many angles to this image. You need to decide what’s happening, to design sound, to tell the story. For me, I quite like things to be quite funny, not too serious, to inject something with a sense of humor and you get a great amount of satisfaction if it works. So I mean it’s a lot of fun but there are times when I long to just be sitting here on my own making drawings.
Crane.tv
INTERVIEW BY PAUL RAPPAPORThttp://www.crane.tv/jo-ratcliffe
Art director, illustrator, and animator Jo Ratcliffe challenges tradition, setting fashion in motion with her multi-dimensional skills.
SUPER NASTY
OUT THERE — ISSUE No. 02JESSICA HOLLAND
Conjuring The World: Get Pulled into Jo Ratcliffe’s Elegant Atmosphere.
Illustration by Jo RatcliffePhoto by Ben Toms
When you interview someone, you’re not supposed to interrupt every five minutes with “ME TOO! YES! I FEEL THE EXACT SAME WAY!” but Jo Ratcliffe—a fashion illustra-tor who looks like a hybrid of model and rock star in black clothing and multi-colored sneakers, with pixie-ish features including long, pale-pink hair—makes it impossible to resist. She’s soft-spoken and petite, and when I switch on a voice recorderat her Dalston studio she says she feels awkward being taped. But as soon as she starts talking about the things she’s passionate about, like the way art can conjure up intense feelings and whole imaginative worlds, she lights up, and I start enthusiastically chipping in about my writing ambitions as though we’re friends from way back.
It’s almost two hours later that the tape runs out, but by then she’s on a roll, andI scribble notes on scraps of paper as she tells me about the way it feels cycling along an abandoned railway line at twilight in the mist, with no one else around. She says her favorite way of clearing her mind after a deadline is wandering around a gigan-tic shopping mall to soak up the “euphoric” atmosphere. “It sounds bizarre,” she says of the mall fixation. “I’m slightly obsessed.”
As a kid from a working-class family, Jo would draw constantly, and ended up going to the iconic Camden art school Central Saint Martins. She never imagined she could make a living from her talent, until a flatmate, then art director at Dazed & Confused, persuaded her to add some illustrations to a fashion spread. She took out a loan to buy a computer, taught herself Photoshop and Illustrator, got offered more magazine work, and was snapped up by an agency.
Since then, she’s worked with some of the most famous names in fashion and pop. Remember the shimmering, neon-glowing cover for Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”? That was Jo, and her Twitter account got a boost last summer when the pop star tweeted in caps-lock about how “INCREDIBLE” she is. Now, Jo says with a smile, “I’ve got a lot of followers who like One Direction.”
For that project, Jo drew inspiration from the “trippy” Alice in Wonderland cartoon movie and the hyperreal photos of David LaChappelle, but her style mutates with each new piece of work. On a windowsill in her studio there’s a witchy record cover she drew for a metal band; nearby are gorgeous collages of models and flowers that she made for a Nina Ricci ad campaign. She’s turned Lily Cole into a wild, mythological creature for the cover of Dazed, added animated creepy-crawlies to a video of Kate Moss for the French fashion house Balmain, and painted a dead mouse into the mouth of Sofia Coppola for the ultra-exclusive magazine Visionaire. (You can buy the issue online for a mere $195.) More recently, she came up with a strange, funny video for Jimmy Choo called “Angel Panda, Devil Panda,” a kind of mash-up of fashion promo, 1980s video game, and surreal Japanese cartoon.
It’s a portfolio as vibrant and contradictory as the artist herself, but what ties it all together is Jo’s swooping, elegant drawing style and her tendency to subvert prettiness with a dash of something unsettling. It makes sense that she’d “kill to work on a Tim Burton movie,” and that she’s a huge fan of the graphic novelist Chris Ware, who mixes crisp, beautiful art with pitch-black humor. She’d like to follow them, one day, into a more narrative art form. “I’m interested in creating characters at the moment,” she says. “I’d really love to make art that touches people emotionally, to tell a story. Hopefully that’s what all this will get me to.”
Vogue UK
NOVEMBER 29, 2012 | AIMEE FARRELLhttp://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2012/11/29/jo-ratcliffe-illustrator-interview---vogue-december-pop-issue
For the pop-themed December issue, Vogue commissioned illustrator Jo Ratcliffe to create a set of fun, graphic fonts to bring the maga-zine’s pages to vivid life. Here, Ratcliffe reveals the playful inspirations and pop masters behind her cartoon-like creations:
What does pop mean to you?Bright, light, colourful, frivolous and anything goes.
Where do you begin on a commission like this?I look through my scrapbook of images and do a little research. That’s generally just to get my mind on the right track for each project. I try not to look back too much or I’ll end up stuck.
What was the pop look you wanted to capture for Vogue’s December edition?Something modern which gave a nod to the pop art of the Sixties, mixed with references mainly from Japan.
What were your pop references for the Vogue project?I was looking at Manga, emoticons, toys, Pokemon and then artists like Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami.
Which graphic creation was your favourite seeing the finished magazine?I think Grimes. I like the mix of the two styles and it’s not serious stuff, so it sits well over the shot of her cheeky smile.
Who is your ultimate pop idol?PRINCE! PRINCE! PRINCE! He was the first and second concert I ever saw.
Computer Arts
OCTOBER 09, 2007
“I have eureka moments in the middle of the night.” admits Jo Ratcliffe. From illustrating Sindy for Marvel Comics to drawing real-life supermod-els and designing for leading fashion labels, this artist’s career isn’t short of breakthroughs!
“I don’t really like creating illustration with a nar-rative,” says Jo Ratcliffe. “I like iconic images. I’m interested in design, and typographic illustration allows me to include drawings of women - or whatever I want - without needing to describe or say something.”
Ratcliffe’s typographic work is but one part of a burgeoning career that has so far taken in pure illustration, editorial work, fashion shoots, album covers and more. Perhaps best known is her work for the likes of Dazed & Confused, Nylon, Vogue and Wallpaper, all of which showcase her adept-ness for glam subjects - in contrast to the purely illustrative, generally darker pieces that she cre-ates for music artists. But, as they say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Although Ratcliffe has always loved drawing, and found it easy even as a child, she says it never really occurred to her to consider it as a full-time job. “The career grew organically rather than from a childhood determination to do what I do now... I didn’t really think it was something many people managed to make a career out of.”
After “much persuasion” by her art teacher and her parents, she went to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design to study fine art, specialising in printmaking - the traditional way. While successful at the course, there was no plumb job to step into immediately, and Ratcliffe soon found herself working as “a bored reception-ist” at toy company Hasbro.
First breaksIt was this position that led to her first real art job: drawing the comic book adventures of Sindy for Marvel Comics, one of Hasbro’s many licensed properties. Was that something she ever expected to be doing? “No not at all! Although I loved Sindy as a kid, much more than Barbie for some reason!
Although this may not have been a traditional route into the industry, Ratcliffe was now on her way, gradually making inroads into the illustration business. “I was living with an art director, who asked me to create some illus-trations for a magazine she was working on, then I was asked by another art director to create some illustrations and I started to put a portfolio together,” she explains. “Then, about a year later, after seeing agencies and companies with my book, I was phoned by an agent who took me on. I think I was very fortunate.”
These days her style is hard to pin down; it appears she can turn her hand to just about any form of illustration. From clean, lean magazine spreads to curling typographic experiments and photomontages, it’s difficult to define the Jo Ratcliffe ‘look’. It’s not a deliberate strategy, she says, but it works to her advantage.
“I don’t want to be pigeonholed - or haven’t wanted to be yet - so it would go against the attitude towards my work to try to characterise it. I suppose I’m somewhere between a designer’s illustrator and an illustrator’s il-lustrator. However, now that I’ve been illustrating for a few years, I feel like settling down with a particular style!” Early influences included Raymond Pettibon (“Not that you’d ever know that!”), Gustav Doré and Arthur Rackham, but now, she says, “I’m not sure I have a design hero.”
Whatever style she adopts in the future, it’s likely to be influenced by both portraiture and typography, two areas that Ratcliffe has grown to love - and in which she
continues to excel. “I’ve drawn so many faces now that my ability to draw has increased tenfold.
Self-taughtComing from a background of working with traditional media, she later taught herself Photoshop and Illustrator - still her tools of choice. She ap-proaches each job completely differently and with fresh eyes, which may explain some of the visual versatility: no two jobs ever look the same.
“There are so many things I experiment with,” she explains. “I couldn’t tell you that I have any specific method. I can be inspired by anything from a photograph to something I’ve seen at a gallery. Most of the time, if I keep my head buried in my work, I have eureka moments in the middle of the night and make a note of those ideas.”
As always, being receptive to new ideas has to be juggled with deadlines. “If you can vary your approach then you will vary the result, but there isn’t always time to experiment. In fact, there’s rarely time. I gather quite a lot of reference material, which I’m still not sure I would advise, as it could just distract you for longer.”
For their surveillance-styled film Everglade, photographers Inez and Vi-noodh were intent on portraying the inner workings of Kate Moss’s psyche. The pair turned to British illustrator Jo Ratcliffe to accomplish the task. Ratcliffe’s career arc has taken her from drawing “Sindy” for Marvel Comics to creating images for publications such as Visionaire and Vogue, as well as fashion brands including Dolce & Gabbana and Marc Jacobs. NOWNESS talked to Ratcliffe to about animating a fashion icon’s thoughts.
How does one inhabit Kate Moss’s mind?I guess there was no specific brief. Obviously she was working and being shot, and the more I looked at the film, the more I thought she looked like she was not settling, so I put something unsettling in there.
Where does the world you created for Everglade come from?There are things engrained in my head: Disney; artists like Arthur Rackham; a British cartoon called Willo the Wisp; Sleepy Hollow—Tim Burton stuff.
You’ve worked with Inez and Vinoodh in the past, notably on a project for Visionaire entitled Fairy Tale, in which you doctored the photographers’ portraits of celebrities, in one case drawing a rat between Sofia Cop-pola’s teeth.I’m not sure [the Coppola picture] was meant to be published, but that was my favorite one.
How did both collaborations come to be?Inez first contacted me a year ago, and we did Visionaire before the animation came about. I’ve been a fan of Inez and Vinoodh’s from the beginning. I just thought that what they produced was sexy and unique and glam-orous and natural at the same time. So when they contacted me it just seemed like a really genuine partnership from the start. I was trying to get across in my work some of the things they get across in their work, and I didn’t think I’d done it yet—but there must have been something that Inez had seen.
So is this the beginning of the next chapter for you—the moving image?Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s a real joy. I’m working on some characters at the moment and I’m talking about mak-ing them into a kind of animated series. But I think that would be more pop than what is going on here. This is dark and expressive. I’ve worked in still images and design where there is plenty of room for expression, but not half as much as when you start moving these things around—giving them sound and voices and some kind of personality. I wish I could spend the rest of the year doing it.
NOWNESS
JANUARY 6, 2011http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/1/6/1245/jo-ratcliffe-dream-weaver
The Artist Gets Inside Kate Moss’s Head for Inez and Vinoodh’s New Film
“I’m not girlie,” Jo Ratcliffe informs our photographer through ever-so-slightly gritted teeth, The fashion illustrator’s drawings have jazzed up ad campaigns for the likes of Louis Vuitton and Balmain - she stuck a bunch of cartoon balloons in Poppy Delevingne’s hand for the former, and sketched a sexy, slithery snake around Kate Moss for the latter - yet the 35-year-old still has a bit of trouble getting her won image across. She has a nose tinier than a baby’s thumb and long blonde hair that would put a Disney princess to shame, so you can see where someone might get the wrong idea, but Jo’s a confirmed tomboy: “You won’t find me in a dress unless I’ve got a reason.” Luckily, we managed to wrestle her into one.
But it’s all about practical clothes when she’s scrambling around catwalk shows, sketching models. Last month, she was resident illustrator on The Daily, the London Fashion Week magazine. Pretty good for someone who snuck into the world’s most impenertrable industry via the reception desk.
“When I was younger, I just took jobs on reception at magazines - and then the art directors would hear that the receptionist could draw...” So now she’s in , is it all fashion soirées and air-kissing till dawn? Not so much. Jo likes her eggs serious-side-up. “The parties can be fun, but I get worn out. And if I go to a drinks thing with my friends, I don’t talk to anyone else.” She’d rather be listening to Women’s Hour or learning to tap-dance. But she does admit that one part of her is definitevly high-fashion: those eyebrows.
They look like she nicked them off Cara Delevingne. “I struggled with them all through the Nineties and then one day a friend of mine said, “Oh my god, look at your eyebrows - when did you get them?” They’ve been on my face all this time. Just stand still and fashion will come to you.”
TATLER Front Row
APRIL 2013 ISSUELUCIANA BELLINI
Here’s Looking At... Jo Ratcliffe
Style File Blog
APRIL 29, 2013KATHARINE K. ZARRELLAhttp://www.style.com/stylefile/2013/04/cole-haan-x-jen-olis-electro-metrop-olis/
The latest Cole Haan x Jen & Oli collection hits stores tomorrow (it’s also available online now), and in order to showcase their new spring wares, Jen Brill and Olivia Kim en-listed artist Jo Ratcliffe to create a futuristic short film. Set to a toe-tapping electro score by artist-cum-musician-cum-DJ Brian Degraw, the video explores a techno-pop fantasy land tailor-made for Brill and Kim’s playfully hued sandals and peep-toe platforms. As Brill puts it, the artists “created the city of [their] dreams—modern in every way, [with] eye candy for miles.” Watch the short (and listen to its catchy track) in its exclusive debut and take a peek at Jen & Oli’s new collection.
Lost at E Minor
MAY 3, 2013DAWN SCHUCKhttp://www.lostateminor.com/2013/05/03/devil-panda-got-your-jimmy-choos/
So this is what happens when big brands hire artists for new campaigns: devil pandas run off with lovely shoes. Naughty panda. This Jimmy Choo commissioned short animation is directed and illustrated by Jo Ratcliffe, in collaboration with artist Rob Pruitt. Pruitt says: ‘I think there is a certain amount of role-playing fantasy that goes into the ritual of buying shoes and I wanted to play up that idea literally with the Angel and Devil panda; it’s the classic good girl/bad girl play’. PowerPuff style Pandas plus pretty shoes, can’t go wrong.
Portable.TV
JENNA HAWKINShttp://portable.tv/fashion/post/oh-kenzo-so-unique/
Directed by Jo Ratcliffe, Kenzonique is a less-than-a-minute-long adventure into the many collaborative minds that have made the label so timeless despite the eccentricities it exhales into the mainstream. The animation by Rob Ward and Suzanne Deakin shows a long limbed model strutting through the streets in her Kenzo designs not distracted by the overload of colours, patterns and conflicting lines in her path, a perfect metaphor for the past, present and future of the label having new live breathed into it.
Lifelounge
NOVEMBER 17, 2011KATIEhttp://www.style.com/stylefile/2013/04/cole-haan-x-jen-olis-electro-metropolis/
Jo Ratcliffe calls herself jocandraw, and she’s not lying. The artist has been commissioned to create artwork for Vogue, Stussy, Wallpaper, The New York Times, SXSW and made some fairyfloss pretties for Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream album cover. Ratcliffe (who’s based in New York City) paints, draws, designs and dabbles in typography too.
Evidently, there’s basically nothing Ratcliffe cannot draw – her portfolio is diverse and extensive – but according to an interview with computerarts.co.uk she can’t draw Cameron Diaz: “I’ve drawn so many faces now that my ability to draw has increased tenfold. There’s not many faces I can’t draw... Although a couple of years ago I had a lot of trouble with Cameron Diaz… Not personally, of course, but she was impossible to draw.”
Her works bounce from lazy-appearing sketches to meticu-lous and sharp designs, playful to polished, silly to sleek. She’s hard to pin down and we like that.
Juxtapoz Magazine
SEPTEMBER 24, 2012http://www.juxtapoz.com/current/the-work-of-jo-ratcliffe
‘Jo Ratcliffe is an artist living and working in London. Rat-cliffe studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art. Her commercial work has been featured on the cover of British Vogue and internationally in publications such as The New York Times, Dazed and Confused, Wallpaper, Another Magazine, Uniqlo Paper and Vogue Nippon.’
Contact:Aeli Park
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