It’s a blustery, wet, almost-fall day in London, and Piers Hanmer has the job of creating transportive backdrops for a fragrance campaign that reflect lively scenes in Greece and Morocco. “Santorini and Marrakech have to come to us with our two bloody enormous sets,” he says, his voice echoing around the small set side room. Hanmer has spent over two decades working as a set designer, creating some of the most vibrant, elaborate tableaux for Annie Leibovitz, Craig McDean, Willy Vanderperre, Steven Meisel, and Steven Klein. “I live on photo shoots. My feet are on concrete 12 hours a day.”
Distracted by Fashion is Hanmer’s new book, tracing an era of liberated, lively magazine editorials. In many ways, it captures a lost time: “There’s still lots of editorial, but there’s not so much set design—nor the budgets we once had,” says Hanmer. “There’s less opportunity to push the envelope.” It’s also a compendium of an artist working behind the scenes, who forged an era’s aesthetic, and who maybe doesn’t get the same recognition as his photographer or stylist collaborators.
“Quite selfishly, I wanted to put together something that was just my work, so when I’m old, I can see my contribution to this insane industry that we love,” Hanmer says.
Still, Distracted by Fashion is no static artifact. Curated by Hanmer, who trained first as a photographer, the book features colorful sets across double-page spreads in all the glossies, interwoven with personal photography, notebooks, sketches, and behind-the-scenes snaps. Hanmer re-photographed his magazine collections, reframing them with curling edges and glaring stripes of light. The book isn’t in chronological order but “meanders” along color and texture stories, tracing the creative mind and the alchemy of fashion editorials rather than singular images. Through Hanmer’s eyes, set design is about creating an entire universe—in step with the clothes and the glam as much as the architecture and lighting.
The book also speaks to the era’s scrappy—and, more often than not, last-minute—energy. “Stylists can have an entire army of people calling in looks, but I need stuff to dry,” says Hanmer. “I was always scrambling—the moment I got a whisper that there was a potential editorial, I was sketching things out. And then, of course, looks would change, spreads would get added to or cut—cutting a spread? God, they’ve ruined my walls!”
“When I actually got thinking about how we put a job together, so much of it just relies on what feels right,” says Hanmer. “You feel it. It’s an unintellectual way of describing the experience, but it’s true. There’s no scientific marker for the spark.”
The book is also a celebration of collaboration and connection. “I landed on my feet when Annie Leibovitz plucked me out of obscurity and hired me,” says Hanmer. After beginning his career assisting on sets in LA, Hanmer met and began working with Leibovitz, who went on to hire him to create sprawling sets—whether she was shooting for Vogue or Vanity Fair. He’s also enjoyed a long relationship with Edward Enninful, a voice in the book. “Edward was an extremely encouraging stylist,” he says. “He would lean on me to build the world for him. We all had a trust in one another, which allows you to run, create, and try new things. You were trying to top the month before.”
The idea for the book came about during a pandemic-era, socially distanced walk with Craig McDean, who encouraged Hanmer and offered his personal archive. “He said, ‘Do you know how many pictures of you I have? I could do a book just of behind-the-scenes pictures of you!’” Hanmer says.
“I get to look at this work now with the same pride I had when I would zip off to the newsagent on the village corner to buy a magazine and see my name in it,” he says. “I see how lucky I was—given carte blanche to pluck ideas out of my head and make them real. The stakes always felt high, and I loved that. You can change a hairstylist or a look in a lineup, but if I’ve produced a multicolored set? Not so much—they’ll ditch it. And I mostly avoided that kind of disaster, somehow.”
Today, Hanmer laments the changes in how we engage with such media. Editorials these days are often distilled to three pictures on a photographer’s Instagram grid. The context—how many pages the spread was given, its dimensions and shape on the paper, the stories it lived beside—is erased. “Now it’s just the greatest hits, but they feel less,” Hanmer says. “Instagram killed the story’s ability to really come alive. And on set, sometimes the ‘deliverables’ can feel more important than creativity.”
A 2009 Vogue Italia shoot Hanmer worked on with Enninful and McDean, titled “It’s a Matter of Glam,” featured model Sasha Pivovarova lying on the tarmac, swathed in a pink fur jacket and opera gloves. The image is encroached upon by a pink plastic bag—an uncanny visual contrast of discard and decadence. Hanmer was inspired by a photograph he had taken in Las Vegas while out walking during a Celine Dion album cover shoot, when he noticed newspapers and trash caught in a fence.
“I had brought all these props to New York—outdoor furniture, seesaws, sofas, bikes—but the tarmac looked like a beautiful painted backdrop, and with the pink bag, it was such pleasing color theory. It had settled into my brain, waiting to be utilized.”
“It was fun. I still live in this world!” adds Hanmer. “For the best part of 20 years, I’ve lived on set in these little make-believe worlds. I hope that people see the fun… I can also see the times we had absolute bloody nightmares, where we screwed up, when we had to stay up and do a total repaint… but you can’t tell! That’s the magic.”
The minute Hanmer gets a break in his schedule, he goes for a drive around the U.S. with his camera. It’s part of an ongoing personal project, taking five or six days at a time to explore places like West Texas, Montana, or the Canadian border.
“I realized, putting this book together, that I felt like I was missing a bit of my creativity, and [the traveling] helps me—maybe it’s another book!”
Still, between this major fragrance campaign in London and a big holiday beauty shoot in New York to come, Hanmer has plenty to stay excited about. “I’m always pushing, even on commercials. I never want to get bored—or, really, to know what’s next.”
Distracted by Fashion is available to buy via Morel Books
