All the Likes

The artist himself – Benjamin Seidler

A series of clever collages combining fashion and film—Mary Poppins Returns’ Emily Blunt in Balenciaga, Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey in Balmain, A Star is Born’s Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in Louis Vuitton—will incite you to add Benjamin Seidler, @benjaminseidler, to your Instagram feed if you’re not following him already. The accessories designer and illustrator became an Insta-favorite in 2016 when he posted a mash-up of the Mean Girls’ Plastics wearing Vetements. “It was the moment Vetements exploded, fashion embraced streetwear and something a lot more raw,” he says. “The collages reflect fashion’s immediacy and the need to bring something new every three minutes.”

Seidler has an impressive and diverse resume, creating illustrations for Prada, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and designing accessories for brands such as Anya Hindmarch, Acne Studios and Smythson. While still in high school, he landed internships with Anna Sui and Tomas Maier at Bottega Veneta.

“I’ve known Ben since he was 16 years old, when he was an intern at my design office,” says Sui. “I immediately recognized something special about him—not just intelligence, but also his dedication and love of fashion.” Seidler credits her “dark but kind of cutesy” aesthetic as an early influence and even created T-shirt graphics for the New York-based designer, which were a big hit in Japan.

“It’s one of my most pure fashion drawings—just colored pencils on paper,” Seidler says of this Diana Vreeland illustration he did for Harper’s Bazaar. “I wanted to really distill what she was all about.”

After a magical summer in New York during the height of Sex and the City, Seidler went on to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins and architecture at Cambridge. Working on the school’s newspaper, he interviewed alum and the publication’s first female editor Suzy Menkes, who offered him a job at the International Herald Tribune upon graduation.

Seidler made his way back into design at Prada, first in store design and then creating prints in menswear. “Illustration really paved the way for me to enter accessory design,” he says. “Whether I was a journalist or a designer, illustration has been with me and has helped me embrace the freer side of fashion.” Seidler has racked up an impressive list of credentials in both the brand and editorial world. Two favorites: discovering a window display he created for Miu Miu as he walked down the street in London and designing ultra-luxurious scarves for Asprey.

Seidler’s illustration of Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, for a London publication

Today he designs for a prominent fashion house and lives with husband Stuart Vevers, executive creative director at Coach, in New York. He illustrates for various magazines and brands (stay tuned for a series of collages for Marc Jacobs) and is always open to new endeavors, whether it’s designing invitations for weddings or fashion shows. Scroll through his IG feed and in addition to those eye-grabbing collages, you’ll see charismatic illustrations of Karl Lagerfeld, Diana Vreeland and other fashion royalty.

“My favorite illustrations of Ben’s are always his portraits,” says Sui. “Not only does he delicately capture the likeness of a person, he can reveal their true inner essence.”

Seidler finds a fashion collection that grabs him and juxtaposes it with a favorite movie for a captivating contrast (think the Clueless crew in Vuitton, the Dreamgirls trio in Marc Jacobs.) “I hope the collages make you do a double take because it looks like someone just wearing a dress, but then you look at it again and you see, oh wait, that’s not quite right,” he says. “It also really makes you look at the dress in the same way a drawing of a dress will.”