The KNWLS Woman Moves Differently, and Iris Law Knows It Better Than Anyone

"The Londoner, the 2000s, and the irony of stepping inside the images she grew up seeing"

The first time Iris Law wore KNWLS, it wasn’t for a campaign. In fact, she says, it was years ago; before there was any semblance of her becoming the face of the brand.

Like most of us, Law, known for her subversive stylistic choices, dresses with instinct. One day, so she wore a KNWLS corset, zipped over a sheer top; off-duty but always on.

That was before Baby, the latest collection from the London-born label. Aptly named and knowingly executed, it’s for the girl who’s always watching and always being watched.

The Londoner has been many things: a Dior muse, a runway regular, the kind of model whose presence in a front row feels as natural as it does on a billboard.

But her place with KNWLS is different; Iris Law and KNWLS exist in symbiosis.

Where other labels rotate faces seasonally, KNWLS builds a world, populating it with figures who don’t just wear the clothes, but belong to them. Law is one of them; her edge alongside the brand’s raw sensuality. 

And in Baby, she is everywhere.

The irony isn’t lost: Law was born in 2000, the very era Baby aestheticises; and whilst she but a child, the images that define this collection – It-girls half obscured by the glare of paparazzi flash, models stepping off curbs in second-skin mini dresses and oversized coats – were being printed in tabloid-y magazines, scanned into Tumblr archives and passed around in fan forums to be scandalised. 

But now, she isn’t just looking at them; instead she's inside them.

The campaign, shot by Marc Asekhame, is all haze and afterglow; a vision of early-aughts voyeurism made contemporary.

Asekhame, known for his dreamlike but unsettling imagery, plays with intimacy and performance, creating scenes that feel both hyperreal and slightly out of reach.

His work often turns the mundane into something charged: a slouched pose, a stray glance, a moment that should be private but isn’t. It’s a fitting approach for Baby, where the premise itself hinges on the idea of being seen, of being captured in a moment that looks unstudied.

Except, of course, it is.

Law, alongside Shivaruby Premkanthan, moves through this world with the kind of ease that makes you wonder if the camera is meant to be there at all.

She lounges with one booted leg thrown over the side of an armchair, pulling a shearling jacket tighter around her frame as if to block a non-existent draught. She drapes herself across a sofa with cigarette dangling loosely from her fingertips, looking past the camera as though there were something more interesting is happening just out of frame.

It is the visual language of early 2000s It-girls, captured in moments they weren’t supposed to be seen in; except here, every detail is calibrated to feel spontaneous.

Even when she is at ease, she is armed; and that has always been the KNWLS woman: dangerous, sensual, never just one or the other. A presence that doesn’t demand attention but never deflects it either.

The defining images of the early 2000s were built on the idea that women could be looked at without looking back, but Baby makes a game of it, and lets its subjects own the gaze rather than be consumed by it.

Iris Law doesn’t sell KNWLS; she is KNWLS. The clothes don’t wear her, and she doesn’t perform them. She exists in them, moves through them as if they were made with her in mind; because, in some ways, they were.

And that’s why she’s still here.

Because nobody puts Baby in the corner.