What Happens When You Illustrate a Monthly Column For a Whole Year?

The fashion items scattered across the composition read like a thrift store haul from 1987. It’s the kind of image that makes you want to rummage through it. Casado has been illustrating this column since January 2025.

In that time, she’s built a consistent visual grammar across pieces on meditation, weightlifting, dating, running, and more. The newest piece breaks her established pattern. Pink ground, light flooding in where darkness usually dominates. It feels like she opened a window.

Those loose, candy-colored outlines that trace the objects without confining them recall the decorative linework of the Memphis Group’s 1980s output, where contour lines existed less to define form than to add rhythm and visual flair. They add energy and a sense of layered, playful dimension without cluttering the composition. The confetti squares scattered across the composition have a surrealist collage logic. A Miró-like display of recognizable things in an impossible space. Casado deploys them here filling space with chromatic energy. The effect is a drawing that feels simultaneously precise and restless. She’s stacking print-culture references from different decades and fusing them into something that feels new.

The article is about finding your personal fashion sense, and that’s exactly what Casado has been doing in plain sight over the past year. Each month, a new brief, a new subject, and each time she returns with a slightly different answer to the same visual question. With the column continuing at the Guardian, every new piece is a chance to watch that style sharpen and shift in real time.

Carmen Casado is based in Madrid, trained as an interior designer at the School of Architecture there before moving into textile design and then illustration. That architectural background is visible in her spatial precision and the way she treats each composition like a planned arrangement of objects on a surface. Her clients include The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Jacobin, El Mundo, Volkskrant, and Berliner Zeitung, among others.