One evening in February 2025, I was reading Vogue when I came across a Louis Vuitton ad featuring a model in a grey outfit with her back turned to us. My mind immediately dropped her in a Seven of Cups card, so I decided to make my own version of the card.

What started as a messy collage with handbags cut out from the magazine in a hurry became a long-term project. I decided I would only use material I already had, so this didn’t turn into yet another excuse to Buy Things. Luckily, I own dozens (dozens!) of UK/US/France Vogues, Vanity Fairs, Harper’s Bazaars, ELLEs, the V&A mag, Les Carnets de Versailles and Mslexia, not to mention all the torn-away editorials I have archived and never looked at again.

If you’re not familiar with the tarot, it is a deck of 78 cards broken down into five families: 22 majors, from The Fool to The World, and four sets of 14 minors or suites (the Cups, the Coins/Pentacles, the Wands and the Swords). The Rider Waite Smith (RWS), illustrated by Patricia Colman Smith, is one of the most famous decks.  

I use the tarot daily as prompts for journaling or storytelling. Anyone can do it; you don’t need to know the meaning of the cards. I have videos of my five-year-old nephew telling a story based on cards he is drawing from Abigail Larson’s creepy Horror Tarot (he thought the monsters were “cute”). I love looking at how different artists imagine the cards' meanings, or at least that’s how I rationalise owning over 30 decks.

Recently, I started screen-printing the collages, some with varying results – my biggest struggle is picking the colours. I thought I could shrink my collages to card size and then screenprint an entire deck, but my attempts (some of them you can see below) have so far been unsuccessful, mostly because the collages are detailed and you lose most of that on A6.

Collaging the Wands

In Ithell Colquhoun’s abstract Taro as Colour, the wands are all red. So, when it came to picking an object I could easily find in glossy magazines to replace the Wands, I figured – the Lipsticks! Like the wands, lipsticks can be used to draw or write. They are red. Their ability to make you feel confident can border on the magical. They are famous as an entry-level purchase for luxury brands. I expected to find lipstick on every glossy page I turned. I was wrong.

Around the pandemic, fashion magazines swapped lipsticks for skincare in their Beauty pages. At a minimum, I needed 59 lipsticks. Even using lip gloss and skincare sticks, I didn’t have enough lipsticks. So, I started cutting out lipstick silhouettes from craft paper, and my friends looked through their own magazine archives. I have noticed that in magazines I have received recently, lipsticks are making a comeback, another recession indicator.

In terms of process,

1/ Before collaging every suite, I do a brainstorming session with Chelsey Pippin Mizzi, who taught me everything I know about the tarot.

2/ I pick three decks and line up the cards to figure out commonalities and differences – for the Wands, it was Tillie Walden’s Cosmic Slumber Tarot; Petra Braun’s Tarot Cards the Modern Goddesses; and my favourite, Tarot de Carlotydes.

3/ I read up relevant entries in Wild Card (Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt), Tarot for Creativity (Chelsey Pippin Mizzi), Tarot for Change (Jessica Dore) and Queering the Tarot (Cassandra Snow).

4/ Then I dive into my magazine pile. Sometimes I know which editorial I am after, but it often takes me ages to find which issue it’s in.

5/ I am meant to record the editorials I pick, but I’m not always diligent about it.

I share some of my thought processes for each card below.

The Ace of Lipsticks

I need hands for every Ace, and watch editorials always deliver on that front. This one is from French Vogue (Nov. 21, “Le Temps qui Court”, Thomas Cristian, watch Hublot). The background is from UK Harper’s Bazaar (Oct. 22, “Born to Rewild in the Cairngorns”, Josh Skinner), and I like that it features clouds, as Colman Smith drew. I decided early on I would play with lips for the series – Aces hero the object in the suite, and here it’s like all lips are drawn to the lipstick. My sister thinks it is very erotic – not my original intention, but I can’t unsee it.

The Two of Lipsticks

This was the first Lipstick I made. I saw the photo and immediately knew it would be for the Two. The background and model are from a UK Vogue article on Jacquemus’ South of France house – he made the blue silk dress. The globe is a key part of the RWS deck, and it took me a while to locate one. I found Mentelle’s Globe in Les Carnets de Versailles (Aug/Sept. 22), which features the oceans and the stars. The model has a choice. She can spend the rest of the day lying back on the stripy cushions, or she can step between the Dior and Tom Ford lipsticks into the great unknown of the ocean. Which one would you do?

The Three of Lipsticks

I often confuse the Two and Three of Wands, as in the RWS deck, they both depict people looking over the horizon. In the Two, the character makes a choice; in the Three, she plans. Here she’s in a garden reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland (hence the pocket watch made by Breguet for George IV in 1827), and she needs to figure out how to get out. Maybe the lipsticks are signposting the way (Dior and Chanel lipsticks from UK Vogue, March 21, by Kate Jackling). It’s probably all a dream – she is, after all, pursued by a blue cat my sister screen-printed and who can’t get enough of her Simone Rocha dress. I’m the cat in this picture.

The Four of Lipsticks

I struggled with that card until I combined its meaning as “the party and wedding card” with the layout of Todd Alcott’s Pulp Tarot. This is a card celebrating your successes, no matter what they are – display the nice flowers (from UK Harper’s Bazaar, Sept 22, “East of Eden”, Erik Madigan Heck), wear the good lipstick with a Rick Owen gown. As I write this, I realise there is something ironic to me using bridal editorials and ads when I often rant about how society puts a premium on women getting married as an achievement. But the tarot is never to be taken at face value, or at least that’s the justification we’re going with here.

The Five of Lipsticks

This was the first time I re-did a card because I wasn’t happy with it. I wanted to represent that feeling when you have many conflicting thoughts sloshing around your brain. At first, the thoughts were depicted by models fighting with lipsticks, but then I decided to represent the inside of a head. The profile is Jessie Buckley’s cover of UK Vogue; the red suit is Michael Kors in Harper’s Bazaar. The white background is from the V&A magazine, but I can’t remember the artist. This turned out to be my favourite card, and I’m quite happy with the screenprinted version too. I like not quite aligning layers when I screenprint; it is absolutely on purpose, not because it's a pain to do.

The Six of Lipsticks

I think about this Covid-period purple leather skirt by Matthieu Blazy for Bottega Veneta at least once a week. I remember watching the A/W22 runway video and being blown away by how it moves. Obviously, owning this skirt is a victory worthy of a little dance in and of itself, for a card about celebrating your successes and achievements.

I am not super happy with how the screenprints turned out; the ink colours didn’t work well together. I tried to match the purple of the skirt, but it didn’t provide the right contrast with the other colours, nor was it quite the right shade of purple.

The Seven of Lipsticks

This is when I started running out of lipsticks. You can tell because I cobbled one together with a short lipstick and craft paper. The model is from an A/W22 Fendi by Kim Jones ad, and I added lips across the bust in reference to (/deference to) Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe A/W22 red-lip dress. She looks determined and tough in her structured, almost equestrian brown leather corset. After collaging this card, I couldn’t get the Dries Van Noten lipstick in the bottom-left corner out of my head, and I now own the exact shade of red and the tub.

The Eight of Lipsticks

This is one of my nemesis cards because I find Colman Smith’s illustration confusing. Are the wands launching or landing? What does it even mean? This is a rare case of Colman Smith almost drawing a pip card, and I hate pip cards. I had run out of lipstick by that point, which is why there are seven silhouettes. I think this collage shows how confused I am with this card, but I like the Simone Rocha dress a lot, so I can’t bring myself to remake it. The meaning of this card is that you have everything you need within you, and I need a pink oversized Simone Rocha dress and three psychedelic cats.

The Nine of Lipsticks

This model has so many things to do that it has split her in two. I wanted to play with rough tears on a very polished outfit, but I think this collage is failed by my background. Again, I was limited with my lipstick options at that point, so I tried to do something fun with craft paper and lips, but I don’t think it quite works. I might redo that one.

The Ten of Lipsticks

Suddenly, I had lipsticks again (thanks, Vicki!)! I like the unity of colours in this one, the contrast between the red and the black-and-white background, and some of the lips. This is a card about carrying more than you can hold. She’s got too much to do and too many disembodied thoughts vying for her attention. I wanted to link back to the Seven through the Lady Dior, because in the Seven, she’s stubborn and determined to set her boundaries and fight her chosen battle, and the Ten is what happens if she doesn’t do it properly.

The Page of Lipsticks

Colman Smith features pyramids, but I couldn’t find any, so I used a photo of the Valley of the Kings from an old Paris Vogue instead. The model is from a Beauty editorial under Carine Roitfeld’s tenure, and it features an Alaia belt. She is off on an adventure and is going to get new perspectives out of it, and I thought that standing in the middle of a hoop, where she might end up upside down, was a good nod to that. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is a loose inspiration.

The Knight of Lipsticks

Wild Card describes the Knight of Wands as the horniest card in the tarot, the one meaning of that card that has stuck with me. The B&W background is from an editorial with women’s tailoring shot in Paris at night. Dita von Teese is from UK Harper’s Bazaar (Oct. 2008). Wild Card also states that “this knight is electric”, so I like that there is a lamppost in the background. Sometimes I include little in-jokes in my collages. This knight is impulsive, and what’s more impulsive than walking around nocturnal Paris in a Philosophy di Alberta Ferretti satin and lace slip dress?

The Queen of Lipsticks

All my Queen cards are Beyonce from her UK Vogue editorial by Edward Enninful and Rafael Pavarotti (July 22). The Queen of Lipsticks draws you in; she is the most brilliant person in the room, especially when wearing golden Schiaparelli Haute Couture. The background is a 15th-century Torrijos ceiling on display at the V&A East Storehouse (V&A magazine, Summer 25). I wanted the result to feel glowing and almost on fire.

The King of Lipsticks

King is a state of mind rather than a gender in the tarot. One of the defining features of Colman Smith’s King of Wands is that he is sitting on a platform, but his wand is planted outside of it, so I did a split background with a Turner painting and the sea. The Kings are the material embodiment of their suite, hence the dozens of lipsticks laid out as lips, combining the two recurring motives from the rest of the series. Here, Dita (UK Harper’s Bazaar, Oct. 2008), in a Giles dress and Agent Provocateur heels, is inspirational, but you could imagine that King is verging towards megalomania.

Over to you: write your own short story

You have two characters, the Seven and the Queen of Lipsticks. Their situation at the beginning of your story is reflected by the Two of Lipsticks, but by the end of it, it is the Four. How do they get there? Turn on a 15-minute timer and have some fun.