Howard Tangye is known for his work as an artist, designer and teacher within the world of fashion. He was Head of Womenswear at Central St Martins in London for sixteen years, retiring in December 2014. During a wide-ranging career he has taught leading designers and artists such as John Galliano, Hussein Chalayalan, Stella McCartney, Zac Posen, Christopher Kane, Richard Nicoll and Julie Verhoeven, amongst others. Tangye himself graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1974 where he was taught by the influential fashion illustrator Elizabeth Suter. He was awarded a drawing scholarship at Parsons School of Design in New York where he was taught by the equally influential Barbara Pearlman.
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Tangye’s work conveys the debt that contemporary fashion drawing owes to traditional figure and portrait studies. He has drawn the collections in the Dior and John Galliano studios, and for Jenny Packham and Zandra Rhodes. His dynamic and expressive compositions demonstrate the profound ability of drawing to bring form and definition to those thoughts, gestures and moments that occupy the spaces left uncharted by the gaze of the camera lens. Employing a decisive line and bold applications of richly- layered oil pastel, pencil, chalk and other media - these studies from life help to articulate how the process of drawing offers a freedom to examine texture, detail, colour and materiality in a way that photography sometimes cannot. While Tangye's drawings are associated with the fashion world, he stresses that he is not a fashion illustrator; his primary focus is on the body and his works are independent drawings rather than illustrations.
