Jackie Nickerson, the celebrated fashion photographer, has worked with everyone from Michael Caine to Kylie Jenner. Name pretty much any fashion magazine, and she will have worked for them at some point. Take Dazed for example: Nickerson photographed Solange for the cover in 2018 (see here). “I love fashion, and I respect that the industry is big enough to encompass many different voices and points of view,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in the materiality, the architecture of fashion and costume, and it still really fascinates me.”

Even so, her relationship with the fashion industry hasn’t always been straightforward. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1960, Nickerson moved to England as a young girl and was raised in the Midlands during the latter part of the decade. She remembers falling in love with fashion aged nine, going to jumble sales at the local Parish hall every Saturday. She’d spend all her pocket money on secondhand clothes – mostly petticoats – but instead of taking them home to wear them, she’d tape them to her bedroom walls like band posters. Aged 12, she was given her first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, igniting her passion for photography. 

At 18, she hopped on a plane to New York to pursue her goals, taking whatever work she could to build experience and a portfolio. By the 1990s, she’d started shooting for publications such as The Face, Vogue and Vanity Fair, but in 1997, she distanced herself from fashion. After being invited on holiday to Zimbabwe with a friend, Nickerson ended up staying for three years, living in a cottage on a farm. Soon the focus of her lens shifted to documentary photography, and in 2002, she published Farm, a collection of images capturing farm workers across Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa. 

For the next two decades, Nickerson continued to explore documentary photography with publications such as Faith, Terrain, and Field Test. However, she never left fashion behind completely, photographing some of her most famous magazine covers during this time. “[Moving away from the industry] didn’t impact my view of fashion,” she says. “I’ve always had the same approach to fashion, and it’s never changed. I’ve always had a feminist vision.” 

In 2026, she’s returning to the industry once again, now with her latest publication, CLAD, a retrospective collection of Nickerson’s fashion imagery (featuring everyone from Kim Kardashian to our very own Solange cover). “I spent most of last year editing and preparing art books with Steidl [the German publishing house] and I kept coming across work in the archive – old tear sheets, magazines, photographs. I thought, why not do a fashion book?”

She notes that a lot has changed since she first started working on sets at 18. “When I started out, everything was shot on film, and we would just use a few polaroids to see the set-up,” she recalls. “There were no screens. Plus, all the people I assisted were white men and nearly all fashion photographers were white men, so that’s changed a lot,” she continues. “There’s more inclusion both in the image-making and in all the other aspects of the industry.”

While she already has an impressive roster of celebrities and fashion designers in her Rolodex, there are still plenty of bucket-list names she’d love to shoot. Among them is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jude Bellingham, Yayoi Kusama, Banksy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Eliot Sumner, Ridley Scott, Cindy Sherman and Margaret Atwood. Magazine editors take note.

Jackie Nickerson’s CLAD is out now and can be purchased here. Swipe through the gallery above to see more.