Everything Here Is Personal
Before Felice Fawn ever thought seriously about fashion photography, she was training to be a tattooist. That detail keeps sticking with me—the precision, the permanence, the understanding of what a surface can carry. She was based in Cambridge at the time, which she describes with real affection: the overlap of open countryside and city, her father’s family a short walk away, everything proportioned just right. She moved from needles to cameras at nineteen and hasn’t looked back.
She was twenty when I spoke to her and already working professionally, which makes the tattoo apprenticeship feel less like a detour and more like a different kind of the same education. She started taking pictures at fourteen—pets, family, the loose archive of a teenager—and by sixteen it had become a genuine practice. The professional life followed naturally, though she’s clear about what she values most: the personal projects, where she can pour more time, more risk, more of herself in. The commissioned work pays and she loves it, but it’s the self-directed work where you can see what she’s actually after.
What she’s after often comes from unexpected directions. Not only other photographers—though she names Patrick Demarchelier as an enduring idol, someone she thinks she’ll never stop returning to—but shop windows, music, the texture of an ordinary afternoon. My eyes and ears are always open,
she says, and you believe it. There’s something quietly obsessive about the way she describes it: inspiration as a constant ambient signal rather than an occasional visitation.
She reads Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar—the obvious answer, and she doesn’t dress it up. Her favorite film is Girl, Interrupted. She watches Family Guy and American Dad for the comedy. And music is, by her own reckoning, the most important thing: Thom Yorke’s solo output and Radiohead, both, in permanent rotation. I could listen to them forever,
she says, and it sounds less like enthusiasm and more like a fact about the structure of her life.
She’s been with her boyfriend for five years—together since they were teenagers, living together for four of those years—and describes it as genuinely inseparable rather than just settled. Three close friends from secondary school, the same dark sense of humor sustaining everything across the years. It’s the kind of stability that doesn’t calcify.
Cambridge suits her. Britain is deeply fashion-conscious, especially London—the concentration of good shops, the visual density of the streets—and she describes herself as fashion-addicted and quietly monitoring the spending. She’d just joined Lookbook.nu when we spoke and found the community genuinely exciting: a fashion platform that felt, she said, like a home rather than a marketplace, somewhere you could get real feedback on how you dress and share inspiration with people who carry the same obsessions in different time zones. She loves pastels and floral prints. Topshop has been delivering on both, she notes with satisfaction.
What does she want for herself going forward? To keep feeling young, be happy, and enjoy what I do.
It sounds like a deflection until you consider she said it at twenty, already doing exactly that.