Collier Schorr Waited Twenty-Six Years for This Margaret Howell Campaign

A photographer’s decades-old wish and a designer’s quiet admiration for her work have finally converged, in a campaign about clothes that move with a body rather than around it.

In the year 2000, Collier Schorr walked into the Margaret Howell shop on Wigmore Street carrying a copy of her own book. She was not there to shop, or not only to shop. She left the book at the counter, on the small chance that someone would eventually hand it to Margaret Howell herself, and that Howell might look at it and think of Schorr the next time a campaign needed a photographer. Nobody called. Twenty-six years later, somebody finally did, and the result is Margaret Howell’s Autumn Winter 2026 campaign, shot entirely by Schorr and titled, simply, “Seen by Collier Schorr.”

 

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The wait was long enough to become its own kind of subject. Schorr, an American photographer known for adolescent portraiture that sits somewhere between documentary and invention, has spent a career photographing the in-between: masculinity read as softness, femininity read as armor, a body caught mid-decision about what it is. Margaret Howell, the British designer who has spent more than fifty years making clothes that refuse to announce themselves, turned out to have been paying closer attention to that work than Schorr ever knew.

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Schorr’s version of the story begins in London, on a job for Topman, the high street menswear chain, of all places. She had brought along her first monograph, Conquistadores, a book she has since described as full of German teenagers, children dressed as soldiers and wrestlers, and other images that were, by her own account, an odd calling card for a brand built on restraint. She wasn’t sure the book would land well if it ever reached Howell’s hands. She left it anyway, then flew home and, eventually, forgot about it.

The idea did not stay forgotten forever, it simply went quiet for a very long time. Schorr kept working, kept photographing, kept building the body of pictures that would come to define her. Then, last year, she turned to her agent and said, in effect, that she wanted the Margaret Howell campaign, all these years later. This time, the answer was yes.

The gap between the two moments is the whole story, in a sense. A younger photographer trying to manufacture a connection through a bookshop counter is a very different proposition from an established artist whose agent can simply make the call. Schorr has spoken about a lesson she carried from her years working for the artist Richard Prince in the 1980s, watching him wait for recognition that took its own time to arrive. The lesson, as she has put it, is that a person develops their own voice until it becomes unmistakable, and only then does it enter the mainstream on its own terms. She has said she felt able to make this campaign now in a way she might not have managed twenty years ago, no longer trying to become the person she once thought she needed to be.

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Schorr’s relationship with Margaret Howell’s clothes predates her relationship with Margaret Howell the person by decades. She first encountered the label in the early 1980s, in advertisements running in i-D, at a point when she had already started wearing vintage pieces and thinking about Bloomsbury references filtered through military surplus. What drew her in was the ambiguity built into the garments themselves, shirts and jackets that could belong equally to a man or a woman, with a boyishness to them that never tipped into hardness.

That androgyny mattered to Schorr on a personal level, not just an aesthetic one. She has talked about the clothes fitting her own sense of being in-between, and about a kind of person the clothes seemed designed for: someone who could walk around daydreaming and still look assembled, a poet’s uniform in the loosest sense, structured enough to hold a shape but slouchy enough to disappear into a crowd. That combination, a garment that could make a wearer both visible and anonymous at once, is the same tension that runs through Schorr’s own photography, where subjects are frequently costumed into an identity that both reveals and conceals them.

It helps that Margaret Howell has rarely wavered from that proposition in the decades since. Where much of British fashion cycled through several full identities across the 1980s and 1990s, chasing whatever silhouette was ascendant that season, Howell kept returning to the same handful of ideas: a shirt cut generously enough to move in, a coat built to outlast the person who first bought it, fabric chosen for how it wears rather than how it photographs new. That consistency is partly why a photographer could recognize the label instantly in a magazine advertisement decades before ever being asked to shoot it herself, and partly why, when the invitation finally came, so little translation was required between what Schorr already did and what the brand needed.

 

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What made the eventual commission stranger and more satisfying, in Schorr’s telling, is that she wasn’t the only one who had been quietly circling the other’s work for years. When she learned that Howell had been looking at her photographs, that they had turned up on mood boards inside the studio well before any campaign was discussed, something shifted. Schorr has described the feeling as a kind of pleasure mixed with permission, seeing her own instincts for casting already present in the collection she was being asked to shoot, as though the brief had, in some sense, been written for her before she arrived.

That kind of mutual recognition is rare in fashion campaigns, where a photographer is more often hired to interpret a mood board assembled by someone else, working to translate a brand’s existing visual identity rather than being invited because that identity had already absorbed something of theirs. Here, the direction of influence had apparently been running both ways for years without either party fully realizing it, Schorr’s pictures shaping how Howell’s team thought about casting, and Howell’s clothes shaping how Schorr thought about the body she liked to photograph.

The cast Schorr assembled for the AW26 images reflects that same instinct. Rather than working from an agency casting call built around a single “look,” the campaign brings together a group of people who read as specific individuals rather than interchangeable models, several of them personal connections of Schorr’s own, cast the way she has always cast her independent work rather than the way a typical advertising campaign is cast.

That approach sits somewhat apart from how most British heritage labels have handled their own AW26 campaign imagery this season, many of them working through established campaign photographers on tightly art-directed shoots built around a single, repeatable mood. Handing an entire campaign over to one artist’s casting instincts, friends and relatives included, is a smaller and more personal gesture by comparison, closer to how a photographer might build an independent project than how a brand typically commissions advertising. For a label that has spent over fifty years avoiding anything that reads as manufactured, it is a fitting way to finally work with someone who had been trying to reach it since the turn of the millennium.

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Ask Schorr how she actually works on set and the answer has less to do with poses than with motion. She has said she is almost always moving while she photographs, and that even when she asks a subject to move, much of the actual movement in a picture comes from her own circling around them rather than from any instruction she gives. That habit, she has explained, comes partly from an earlier period making dance videos, where she learned that people change measurably once they start moving, and that clothing itself only reveals its real character once a body forces it to follow along.

It’s a method that depends on trusting the garment to hold up under motion rather than staying pinned in a single, flattering silhouette, which is precisely the quality Schorr says she recognized in Margaret Howell’s clothes from the beginning. “I always had a sense of being able to move in Margaret’s clothes,” she has said, and that sense of movement is what made the prospect of finally photographing them exciting rather than simply overdue.

<div style=”max-width:100%;margin:40px 0;”> <img src=”” style=”border-radius:16px;box-shadow:0 20px 40px rgba(0,0,0,0.25);width:100%;” alt=”Margaret Howell Autumn Winter 2026 campaign image, photographed by Collier Schorr” /> <p style=”font-style:italic;color:#555;text-align:center;”>Margaret Howell Autumn Winter 2026 campaign. Photography by Collier Schorr.</p> </div>

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Among the people Schorr photographed for the campaign is the child of a friend, wearing one of the collection’s looks, a detail Schorr has singled out as unusually affecting to see. It is a small, specific note in a campaign otherwise built around adults, but it fits the wider logic of a shoot cast from Schorr’s own circle rather than assembled at arm’s length through an agency. Seeing someone she already knows, at an age she has watched change, wearing a designer’s clothes inside a campaign she waited a quarter-century to shoot appears to have collapsed several timelines into one image at once, her own history with the brand, her subject’s youth, and the adult professional relationship that made the picture possible in the first place.

That instinct toward familiarity over unfamiliarity runs through how both women have approached their respective crafts for decades. Howell has spent her career resisting trend cycles in favor of clothes built to be worn for years, not seasons, and Schorr has built hers around subjects she returns to repeatedly rather than treating every sitting as disposable. A campaign shot partly among friends, and partly around a child growing up inside that same orbit, reads less like a marketing exercise and more like an extension of a working method both women already had before this project brought them together.

Margaret Howell Store Interior

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Schorr’s own relationship to Margaret Howell’s clothes has, by her account, stayed personal well past that initial 1980s discovery. Looking through the AW26 collection ahead of the shoot, the first piece she responded to was a dress, one she has said she immediately wanted to buy for her partner, a small, almost involuntary reaction that had nothing to do with the job in front of her.

She has also talked about an old Margaret Howell windbreaker she bought around the same London trip that produced the abandoned book, a jacket she later lent to an ex-partner to walk home in the rain and never got back. She only discovered years afterward that Howell owns the identical jacket herself, a coincidence Schorr has described with some amusement. Beyond that one loss, she still owns a shirt jacket and two striped shirts from the early 2000s, pieces she says she keeps rediscovering in her own closet, each one carrying her back to a specific period defined, in her words, by how badly she wanted the clothes and how much she believed in them.

That personal archive, one lost windbreaker, one surviving shirt jacket, two striped shirts kept for over twenty years, functions as its own quiet argument for the brand’s founding premise: clothes made well enough that a person keeps wearing them, and thinking about them, long after the season they were designed for has passed. Founded in 1970, with its first standalone shop following six years later, Margaret Howell has built an entire identity around that kind of durability, part of why the Wigmore Street flagship, with its dark varnished floors and secondhand pieces of twentieth-century furniture arranged under natural light, feels closer to a considered private collection than a conventional retail floor.

Schorr has said that while making the campaign, she found herself thinking about who she had been as a younger woman, and then deliberately setting that version of herself aside so she could work as who she actually is now, no longer photographing to prove something or fit somewhere. After twenty-six years of waiting, she has described the finished campaign less as a culmination than as a beginning, the first Margaret Howell project rather than a long-delayed last one.

The Autumn Winter 2026 collection, and the accompanying campaign and lookbook, are available now through Margaret Howell’s own stores and online.