Best of Tatty Devine Shoots | 25 Years of Tatty Devine

Lights. Camera. Action. As we celebrate the silver anniversary of Tatty Devine, join us here on the blog once a month as we head down memory lane and delve into some of the best bits of the past 25 years! 

Our original art jewellery is known for being bright and colourful, making you feel good and telling a story. Bringing these tales to life we always look to a special friend, the lens of a camera to bring our visions to life. With groundbreaking aesthetics, special guest models to totally out-there ideas, scroll through the stories behind some of our Co-Founder, Harriet’s favourite shoots:

SS00, Wish You Were Here

In 2000, we hadn’t become ‘real jewellery designers’ yet, Tatty Devine was still in its infancy. Fresh from art school with a lifelong passion for making and creating, we were using found objects to craft designs not many understood. It took another 5 years after this, our ‘first ever shoot’, or maybe we should say our ‘first-ever curated collection’, for people to quite understand what it was we were doing. People didn’t know it was jewellery and would constantly ask us “What is this?!”

Curating our looks was an extension of our creativity. This made it easy to style our flatmates and the creatives we were surrounded by in handmade clothes and layers of our new accessories, then head down to Southend armed with just a Lomo camera.

Rosie had been lucky enough to visit Russia where she had found a vintage Lomo camera in a junk shop, it didn't work but Rosie loved collecting old cameras! Around this time she happened to meet an ambassador for the cameras as we know them now, who taught us how to cross-process and create this iconic oversaturated look which was trailblazing at the time. 

With the help of Snappy Snaps, we printed We a small limited set of these images. An edition of just 200 that we gave away at a tea party, in 2000 that was way cooler than going to a club. Tweeness had just been reinvented!

SS07, Photography by Harriet Vine MBE

2007 was the year I moved into Bethnal Green. While the flat was unfurnished and stark white it became the location for our Spring/Summer 07 photoshoot.  At the time we didn’t know the language around shoots and production, to us it was just image-making. It felt very punk and DIY.

Full of energy and obsessed with working and making things happen, we always did everything ourselves in these image-making sessions. We sourced the clothes (from our wardrobes), we did the hair, we did the makeup, we took the photos and we had so much fun doing it.

All the models were people we knew: there was our friend Rebecca, who is an actress, Annie who’d pretty much just arrived from Japan and was on a mission to work for Tatty Devine and our intern Natalie - our thing was burping competitions.

Spring/Summer 2010, Photography by Tai Shani

I am still enamoured by this shoot. Spring/Summer 2010 was one of the first times I’d truly let somebody, other than Rosie, come on board to visually tell the stories behind the jewellery we were creating. A huge part of the creative scene we were a part of, there was no better candidate than Tai Shani - Rosie’s then bandmate and now a Turner Prize winner!

We were all obsessed with expressing ourselves through our style and loved the fantasy of dressing up, I remember the dress code for this photoshoot was ice cream parlour girl chic. Tai was working at the Horse Hospital and Contemporary Wardrobe around this time so had access to the most wonderful vintage clothing. She understood the collection was all about dressing up and the theatre behind that. Tai wasn’t just a photographer but she built an environment that told a story. She brings a beauty to everything she does: you could see that then and you can see that in her work now.

Spring/Summer 2013, Photography by Saga Sig

Stylist extraordinaire John William came into our lives in 2009/2010 after he graduated from UAL. He worked on so many incredible shoots combining up-and-coming talent from photographers to make-up artists to models - including FKA Twigs who was about to make her musical debut. More on John later!

Autumn/Winter 2013, Photography by Jonny Storey

Our AW13 campaign was my first time having to art direct a photoshoot or so I thought, upon reflection I had really been doing it the whole time. We would always do everything ourselves, this time I sourced a brand new creative team. Translating my ideas into words that a photographer could understand and that would bring together this team, I had to think about what we wanted to say through the imagery. 

I wrote the craziest brief for our photographer Jonny, from what I remember it went like this: “A girl from 1967 is listening to Hawkwind. She goes to a cross between Imperial College and the RCA and she’s just started experimenting with psychedelics.”

I didn’t sleep for a week before this shoot but we totally nailed it! My friend, Vasso, was a professor of mathematics and she worked at the location we used, it was just perfect. Paying particular attention to the details, it wasn’t just the jewellery that had to be right, it was everything: from rubber gloves to spending hours researching chemical equations from recipes for LSD to molecules of plastic to draw on the blackboard.

Spring/Summer 2014, Photography by Catherine Laura

I always strive for a challenge and want to push myself, so once I felt I had shoot days pretty much nailed I thought how can I push the boundaries even further?! Shoot underwater, of course! We hired the most impressive mansion in Cheshire for this day: it was utterly ridiculous, a real footballer’s house. 

It was empty and up for sale at the time, we hadn’t thought about the pool heater being off - the water was freezing! Totally worth it and totally encompassing the collection as a whole, I love the ephemeral imagery it produced. Catherine had previously shot underwater imagery so she was the expert on set: none of those ripples and light reflections were photoshopped, she made it all happen inside the camera.

Tatty Devine X David Bowie 2021, Photography by Xanthe Hutchinson 

This section is more a love letter to Xanthe Hutchinson than a love letter to a particular shoot. I’ve worked with many great photographers over the years but Xanthe became a friend and she’s shot many of our campaigns. I loved her work, I still love her work and always looked forward to our shoot days together! 

Our first Tatty Devine X David Bowie campaign in 2021 was a well-observed retelling of the source material. It had great energy and captured everything I wanted it to! 

Discover our 25th Birthday collection, Party Like It's 1999, online and in-store and keep your eyes on the blog for more magic moments. 

Share Article