Piers Hanmer New Book: Distracted By Fashion

Now living with a book celebrating his two-decade-long career, the set designer talks about burnouts, photographing trash, and how the economics of image-making have changed.

There’s something distinctly Piers Hanmer in the way his spaces hold tension. As one of fashion’s most prolific set designers, Hanmer elevates the everyday into something seductive and otherworldly. His sets often begin with a modernist spatial clarity — geometric restraint, disciplined lines, an almost architectural calm — before becoming vessels for surrealist disruption. Subtle distortions, unexpected juxtapositions, and a lingering sense of suspended reality gradually tip the rational into the dreamlike. 

For twenty years, we witnessed how Hanmer’s flair reshaped editorials alongside photographers like Craig McDean, Steven Klein, and Patrick Demarchelier. But we now get a rare glimpse into his creative process through his scrapbook-style visual compilation Distracted by Fashion, in forms of intimate polaroids, rough sketches, scribbly notes, and photos he took on his subway commutes that somehow translated onto a Vogue Italia spread. 

“I didn’t need to have an interest in fashion, and I still have no interest in fashion,” said Hanmer as he laughed about his aptly named book. Before assisting the legendary Annie Leibovitz in Los Angeles and being catapulted into the fashion industry’s most important shoots, the British set designer was a photographer — he spoke to me in his New York City apartment with a portrait he took of Blondie’s Debbie Harry hanging on the wall. 

“I think we are astonishingly inarticulate when we say you just know it when it’s right, but it’s an indescribable sensation that goes back to the tingle that I got when I was lighting an apple core.“

“I’m inspired by very simple things, everyday ordinary things repositioned in a way that makes you look.” The sentiment runs throughout the book: photographs of trash cans, rusted pipes, and solitary chairs sit alongside behind-the-scenes of photoshoots. But it’s also reminiscent of when a 15-year-old Hanmer staged a quiet study of erosion at school: an apple slowly consumed, each bite captured on black-and-white film, the light grazing its surface until nothing but the core was left. “I remember a parent saying, ‘I like this, I like the light on it.’ Then a light bulb went off in my head,” said Hanmer. 

Years later, Hanmer found himself on a set where Edward Enninful didn’t feel quite right and asked for more to be done. Out of a truck full of props, Hanmer pulled out a pink plastic bag and laid it next to Sasha Pivovarova, the model lying on a tarmac road, dressed in pink fur and covered in exquisite, glittery gemstones. “It became this beautiful sculptural moment. The moment I put it down there, Craig [McDean] loved it. Then Edward loved it,” said Hanmer. “The apple that I took a bite of as a 15-year-old and the trampled plastic bag that I put into Italian Vogue all came from the same head.”

So it really isn’t the fashion that makes Hanmer’s work exciting. It’s about creating a narrative. It’s about adding something quotidian, banal, or foolish to a frame that balances the choreography between the light, the model, the garments, and the air. On top of that, to sense what works right away. “I think we are astonishingly inarticulate when we say you just know it when it’s right, but it’s an indescribable sensation that goes back to the tingle that I got when I was lighting an apple core.” 

Distracted by Fashion, however, certainly isn’t a catalog of Hanmer’s portfolio or simply a nostalgic archive. “It’s a celebration of a period that no longer exists,” Hanmer reflected. “Budgets have shifted. Photographers are still shooting for these magazines, of course — but you rarely see sets like these in editorials now. They’re simply too expensive.” Hanmer is one of the handful of designers in the niche trade who were extremely fortunate, a sentiment he stressed repeatedly, to have specialised in building narratives for fashion back in an era defined by experimentation, creative liberty, and the capital to support them. 

“No, they weren’t fun, they were very alarming, it was literally like ripping myself open and exposing myself, having to create these worlds extremely fast.“

Fortunate, yes, but that is an era far from glamorous. Hanmer agrees that chaotic is the right word. When he was commissioned by Grace Coddington for an American Vogue story with model Raquel Zimmermann, he designed a Mondrian-esque walk-in composition of colourful planes, blocks, and portals. He had his set builders construct them in advance, only to land at JFK the night before an 8 AM shoot to find “the most hideous” set in the Long Island warehouse. Staying up, repainting the life-size set, and some industrial fans on full blast saved the day, but that was a reality not necessarily reflected in the still photos in the book. 

“My extreme sensitivity is my superpower, but it does leave you quite exposed,” Hanmer said. Sometimes it’s being given the creative liberty by busy editors in the planning, but being asked to change things at the last minute. Sometimes it’s being asked to do a 16-page story that outlines more don’ts than dos. “No, they weren’t fun, they were very alarming, it was literally like ripping myself open and exposing myself, having to create these worlds extremely fast.”

Also bear in mind that set designers weren’t paid for editorials: “the unspoken rule was that photographers that I worked for editorially would put me on the advertising jobs when they have them,” Hanmer said. “This is the reason why I wanted this book to be about editorials, because it was the one space where magazines knew we were generating the ideas and gave us complete freedom.”

Twenty-three years later, Hanmer still feels his heart pounding and the adrenaline rushing. It still isn’t fun for him; it’s still a “burnout” when creativity is used commercially, and the stakes are high. But “it is insanely creatively satisfying when the images come out.” The industry has undergone a complete transformation, but everything about Hanmer’s creativity has remained constant in the best possible ways. 

“The same things that intrigued me 20 years ago still intrigue me today. I will continue to take photographs for fun,” said Hanmer, also with a pencil in hand, ready to sketch out any idea as seen in the book. “I don’t give a damn if they never see the light of day; it gives me an enormous sense of happiness and contentment to record.” Still distracted by fashion, there is something paradoxical about the fact that the everyday curiosity he calls “fun” is the very impulse that feeds his work and burnouts. But it is also the instinct that keeps him returning to the frame — not for the industry, but for the quiet thrill of seeing something ordinary tilt, once again, into light. 

All images courtesy of Piers Hanmer. Distracted by Fashion, Mörel Books, available here.