Inside the mind of Tom Macklin: creative direction across fashion, film, and casting

For the past 25 years, flip through fashion editorials and magazine covers and you’ll find Tom Macklin’s influence everywhere—quietly shaping stories you didn’t even know you were watching.  The creative powerhouse at the intersection of casting, cultural engagement, and event programming shows that the roles he occupies don’t have to exist separately. When driven by storytelling, they thrive together. Macklin’s brainchild, Club Ciné, perfectly captures his love for a good narrative, showing how film clubs can occupy an unexpected space in contemporary culture while nodding to the celebrity-focused lens that makes his fashion work so cinematic.

For Macklin, casting always follows the same lines as a perfectly constructed script. He admires the intentionality of brands like Saint Laurent and visionaries like Jonathan Anderson, who aim to build community rather than a roster-focused world. Throughout his career, marked by discovering rising talents and nurturing their stories rather than overwriting them, he has resisted letting the industry’s pace dictate his own.

In this conversation with hube editor-in-chief Sasha Kovaleva, Macklin opens up about the Hitchcockian influences in his work, how the casting landscape has evolved, and the challenge and freedom of building a career that defies convention.

Sasha Kovaleva: Your career has unfolded across different corners of the creative industry. Looking back, what were the formative experiences that shaped your eye for talent and the kind of stories you want to tell through casting?

Tom Macklin: As a kid on family holidays, my sisters would be off making friends by the pool whilst I was content in my own little world with a book, my Sony Walkman, or watching films. I had an appetite for art and culture that I couldn’t quite explain—I just gobbled it all up. That instinct to observe rather than perform has stayed with me. It’s part of who I am.

If I trace the foundations of my eye for talent and the kinds of stories I’m drawn to tell, it begins with magazines.

I was obsessed with them from a very young age and would spend my pocket money collecting everything from i-D, Smash Hits and The Face to old issues of Vogue, Sky magazine, Sight and Sound, Blitz and anything else I could get my hands on. I still have them all. From around the age of ten until university, my bedroom walls became completely rammed with magazine covers, fashion campaigns, and editorial shoots layered on top of one another. You couldn’t see wallpaper. Mates would come round and comment—it was always a talking point. I was obsessed. I guess it was like a living, breathing mood board.

I kept scrapbooks too. That instinct to collect, edit and live inside references arrived early, long before I understood it as a creative skill.

I watched loads of film and documentary, and I became highly attuned to casting. If a character felt believable, I gave myself completely to that film or image. If the casting felt wrong, I disconnected almost immediately. I recognised that difference instinctively, without needing to articulate it.

I was always curious about how things were made. The mechanics. The decisions behind an image. The thinking that shaped the final outcome.

Alfred Hitchcock was hugely formative for me. I loved his films, but more than that, I loved his casting. The restraint. The psychology. The way tension was created through presence and withholding rather than excess. His work taught me that casting isn’t about charisma alone—it can be about control, implication and intention.

That sensibility extended into photography. I discovered Helmut Newton during university—his images were bold, sexy, and cool. I found Charlotte Rampling through his work just at the same time that I blew my university grant in my fresher’s year on art books during a trip to Soho. Sorry, Mum. His photographs felt romantic but tough. Cinematic. I was instantly drawn to them.

Andy Warhol and Corinne Day were hugely important too. Their work was plastered over my university bedroom wall. Warhol’s relationship with fame and repetition, and Day’s raw approach to bodies and vulnerability, influenced how I understand presence. Both reinforced the idea that casting is a form of authorship. Others I discovered around the same time were Saul Leiter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Herb Ritts and Jürgen Teller.

Culturally, I always understood the mainstream, but I was more instinctively drawn to the left field. I trusted voices that felt singular.

Filmmakers like John Waters, Gregg Araki, Pedro Almodóvar, David Cronenberg and Gus Van Sant shaped my early sensibility, as did Stanley Kubrick, William Friedkin and Fassbinder. The Shining fascinated me at an age when it probably shouldn’t have. Alien and Cruising left a deep imprint. I watched Serial Mom over and over. I developed a love of horror ignited by late night showing of A Nightmare on Elm Street that I snuck out of bed to watch.

I also paid close attention to actors. Viggo Mortensen was a teen pin-up for me, but also, as an actor, felt like someone whose choices carried weight and consequence.

Music was so influential, not only sonically but visually. George Michael was hugely formative for me as a music idol and role model, as a young gay man, so I was especially excited by his visuals: album art and the casting of his music videos. Freedom, Too Funky and Fast Love felt radical at the time. Bodies, gay identity and desire were presented with agency, not apology. Sade, too.

Alongside that, I loved and followed the evolution of Kylie Minogue in the 90s.

What fascinated me wasn’t reinvention as a gimmick, but the way magazines, photographers and stylists saw something in her that mainstream culture initially didn’t. They recognised range, elasticity, depth – and through collaboration, they helped draw that out. Those early The Face and i-D covers in 1990, 1991, and 1994 were provocative without being sensational. They created conversation rather than scandal.

I have those original magazines that I bought at the time framed in my hallway now (and have worked with her on many covers since).

Watching that slow, intelligent re-seeing of a figure everyone thought they understood had a profound effect on me. It reinforced my attraction to change, to evolution, and to refusing to stay fixed.

To the dismay of my parents, I’d spent hours in bookshops and newsagents before school reading magazines cover to cover. I loved New York Magazine and am still a subscriber. 

I have Asperger’s and so all these early obsessions fed into a single instinct. A sensitivity to something meaningful. A belief in presence over performance. This belief formed early and sharpened over time, and it continues to shape how I see talent and the stories I want to tell through it.