Meet the 26-Year-Old Brit Artist Collaborating with Burberry and Mario Testino

It’s safe to say that by now, the photographer Mario Testino and the model Edie Campbell have Burberry campaigns down to a science: The pair has over 25 years of experience shooting ad campaigns for the house between the two of them. This season, though, they added an extra creative step: once Testino shot Campbell and fellow British Burberry alum Callum Turner in the usual, elegant spread of pea coats and trenches, they sent the images to Luke Edward Hall, a 26-year old artist and interior designer.

With an arsenal of watercolors, chalk, oil pastels, colored pencils, and acrylics, Hall interpreted them in his “very romantic and nostalgic” style – which might well describe Hall himself, who’s wont to cycle around London in his Burberry rucksack embroidered with his initials in gold thread. His portraits of Campbell and Turner are running alongside Testino’s images in the newly revealed campaign, along with five still lifes of the Patchwork bag – a piece Hall said he was taken with because each is so unique (every one is named after a different British village, town, or street, and made of different materials). “They’re a complete riot of color and texture,” he said.

While an ad campaign is new territory for Hall, it’s hardly his first foray into fashion – he actually studied menswear design at Central Saint Martins. And collaborations are becoming de riguer for rising artists on the scene. Last month, he designed a set of dinner plates and painted them with Greek hero-inspired scenes for “Young Bright Things,” a London exhibition organized by W’s Contributing European editor, Gianluca Longo. “I do enjoy collaborating with people, not always other artists necessarily, but makers and designers,” Hall said. “I love applying my aesthetic to products made by people who are experts at what they do.”

His solo career is hardly suffering, though. In addition to painting and interior decorating, he’s had his own line of homewares and fabrics since 2014, and in his early 20s, he even ran his own antique shop. “I’ve never had, or particularly wanted, one true calling,” Hall explained. “What I’ve preferred is applying my aesthetic to lots of different things – clothing design, fabric design, ceramics, interiors,” he said, adding that lately, he’s been focusing on painting and ceramics. “Perhaps I would return to creating menswear in the future, but I feel like there’s a lot of things I’d like to do within interior design first. I think at the moment there’s much more room for creative innovation.”

In any case, Hall said all his designs spring from the same place, and are “part of the same story,” even if they don’t exactly have a message. “For me it’s more about recognizing and portraying the everyday beauty in a vase of flowers or a bowl of lemons – and heightening it somehow.”