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With a client list that spans luxury brands such as Christian Louboutin, Chanel and Jimmy Choo, director and artist Quentin Jones has undoubtably secured a spot on the front row of fashion film. 

Her instantly recognisable aesthetic – a surreal and stylish synthesis of photomontage, animation and paintwork – has graced the online pages of Vogue, the hallowed halls of the V&A Museum and inspired a general trend for colour-popping, cut-and-paste collages across the genre.

And yet, she admits, “filmmaking wasn't something I set out to do. But then I didn't really set out to do anything.” There aren’t many filmmakers who combine a Cambridge degree in philosophy and a Masters in illustration from [the UK’s leading art school] St Martins, with a background in modelling, but that meandering career path has lent Jones a unique perspective in the often bland, identikit world of fashion film.

Jones broke into fashion film with Chanel, who commissioned her after she sent them a short spec film.

She stumbled upon the roots of her signature style by accident during her MA, taking stop-motion pictures to document the process of creating her multi-layered, static collages and going on to shoot “very lo-fi, stop-motion films of paint moving over pictures being torn up – stuff you still see in my work” for her final show. 

Alongside her studies, she was modelling on the side (“mainly depressing catalogue shoots, but occasionally I’d do something a bit more glamorous”) and during a dinner at Paris Fashion Week, she showed her work to one of the designers who suggested she do something like if for a fashion collection.

People often talk about me ‘modelling’ in my work and I always thought if I was much older, or looked very different, you wouldn’t describe it like that – you’d say making self portraits.

Inspired, Jones made some short animated spec films for a few fashion brands, among them Chanel – who, to her amazement, contacted her with a direct commission. Work for Victoria Beckham and Kenzo soon followed. “It all happened very, very quickly,” says Jones. “It was when people were starting to watch fashion content online and I was lucky that I was doing something that other people weren’t doing, at that time, in that arena.” 

Kenzo and other top clients swiftly followed on from her work with Chanel.

Looking back on her early commercial work inspires both a laugh and a wince. Each project took months, with Jones laboriously shooting thousands of stills of the model moving on set to create the film, printing each frame and either wielding her scalpel or painting on top, before linking the stills back together. “As I progressed through my career, I realised it was freaking people out that I wasn't shooting stuff ‘properly’ [live video footage] and also realised the limitations – it could look scrappy and one didn’t always want things to look ‘stop motion’,” she explains.    

Ten years on, Jones’ work is slicker and more sophisticated - those characteristic “layers” increasingly realised through dynamic video editing, rather than physically cutting and painting. She’s also added 3D animation to her creative toolbox, thanks to the pandemic and a month-long confinement in her Brooklyn apartment.

“Sometimes the best way to learn is through a project – just shoot it and go for it,” she says. “I had that time and space in lockdown to tinker with it and play with these new styles of animation.” The result was It Was Fine, a short film-slash-“fever dream” inspired by existential solitude, which she shot, directed, edited and animated herself. 

Jones refined her signature style of animated photomontage and paint work with the lockdown project It Was Fine.

Evoking an endless Instagram scroll and peopled by characters both beauteous and grotesque (all played by Jones and shot in her spare room on green screen), It Was Fine skewers the gap between real and projected images on social media, which lockdown exacerbated (“How marvellous,” chirps the non-ironic voiceover, “to have a little time for self-discovery”).

Dressed in increasingly outlandish outfits, wigs and makeup, Jones strikes high fashion poses and pouts. Characters multiply and shrink, heads split open and faces are smashed into pixelated pieces. But there’s a sly humour amidst the surrealism – the words ‘Inner Peace’ emerge from between a pair of pert buttocks, while in a nod to the cannibalistic content machine, Jones eats a miniature version of herself.

The bold way she manipulates images does occasionally give Jones pause for thought about the currency of beauty and visual identity.

The effect is somewhere between the distorted mirrors of a funhouse and “how you would interpret a 2D collage if there was a way to dive through layers of artwork” – and though, she admits, the film sits slightly oddly on her reel, it was a valuable learning experience that opened doors to more complex commercial work. 

Her recent spot for Jimmy Choo’s collaboration with Marine Serre showcases many of the techniques from It Was Fine.

Her Jimmy Choo x Marine Serre collaboration.

It Was Fine wasn’t the first time Jones has appeared in her own work. Does it feel like she’s reclaiming her visual identity, as a former model? While she’s quick to point out she was never “at a level where I was a celebrated creative part of what was happening in front of the camera”, she’s interested by the assumptions her background raises. 

“People often talk about me ‘modelling’ in my work,” she muses, “and I always thought if I was much older, or looked very different, you wouldn’t describe it like that – you’d say making self portraits.” On a very basic level, she says it’s just a case of using the most convenient face and body available to her: “When I have an idea in my studio, I'm there and I can do it.”

Boys Don't Cry was meant to be an optimistic look at the possibility of plurality, of freedom and the shackles of [traditional] masculinity coming off.

Nonetheless, the bold way she manipulates images does occasionally give Jones pause for thought about the currency of beauty and visual identity. On a recent job for a jewellery brand, she was asked to shoot herself and “go heavy” on the collage and paint layers. “It’s interesting painting on top of your own face – you have to decide: which bit do I respect and give space for? And when you’re working with a famous model’s face, you don’t want to paint over the ‘money’ bits, the features they’re known for."

Boys Don't Cry was created for the prestigious V&A Museum's, Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear exhibition.

Having thoroughly decoupaged the female form every which way, last year Jones turned her attention to the male counterpart with Boys Don’t Cry, a video installation project for the V&A’s Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear exhibition. 

In Jones’ piece - the exhibition finale, representing the future of men’s fashion – four male dancers pirouette and vogue through time and space, flexing bare bodies and flaunting extravagant gender-fluid outfits that would do Bowie proud, reflected ad infinitum across an entirely mirrored room. “It was meant to be an optimistic look at the possibility of plurality, of freedom and the shackles of [traditional] masculinity coming off,” explains Jones.

In a radical departure from her usual colourful chaos, she opted to shoot in black and white and pare back the action, drawing visual inspiration from Dada-esque and Cubist montages. “Black and white gave a cohesiveness between the different threads that I wanted to pull in in the film – gender bending, male ballet, Greek busts and statues. I thought to have that all coming in colour might actually make the room feel very hectic,” she adds. 

“And it was really fun to think about simplified, very pure graphics. I wanted to challenge myself to get out of my hectic layered stream, but still be able to play with that 3D realm that I'd been teaching myself about, without it having to be a clusterfuck of artwork.”  

Jones enjoyed working with Kate Moss, who became Diet Coke's creative director in July of last year.

In the future, Jones would love to do more video installation projects – but with a house renovation to fund and another mouth to feed (she recently gave birth to her third child), she’s been “stacking up the commercials” instead. Though top model status might have eluded Jones personally, a recent project for Diet Coke saw her collaborate with perhaps the most iconic ‘super’ of them all – Kate Moss, in her surprising new incarnation as the brand’s creative director. Shooting two spots alongside the stills campaign plus a raft of short social clips was “hectic”, but “Kate was a lot of fun – she is the ultimate pro on set with a really dirty sense of humour, so we had a cackle.” 

Diet Coke marks a side-step from the world of pure fashion into other sectors, as Jones has recently wrapped commercials for Apple Music and AT&T and is pitching on another beverage brand. “I feel like [fashion film] has had waves of being respected and not really being respected,” she says of diversifying her reel. “Even agents who are fashion [specific] have at times said, ‘We really need to work on getting you out of that niche’ – which, to a certain extent, I did last year working with lifestyle and tech brands.”

Once the combined chaos of a new baby and house renovation has calmed, Jones hopes to add a few more layers to her craft, including resurrecting a narrative film script for a project with her US reps, Cadence, and perhaps landing her first music video – “a collaborative, art-based project with somebody like Miley [Cyrus, who she previously shot a tour promo for], who brings a real performance to the table.”