Wearable Worlds, Livable Art

It’s the sign of a brand committed to doing something different. Long admired for its architectural silhouettes and quietly radical design language, COS has teamed up with interior design practice Studio Ashby to unveil a multi-city installation project celebrating female artists. Unfolding across three retail locations; London’s Regent Street, Paris’s Rue Tronchet and Helsinki’s Aleksanterinkatu, this collaboration offers an immersive retail experience that blurs the lines between fashion, interior design, and conceptual art, inviting you to look closer and linger. 

Helmed by Sophie Ashby, Studio Ashby designs distinctive, authentic interiors by blending natural materials, antiques, modern art, guided by timeless style. The studio demonstrates a consistent and proactive approach to supporting women artists, particularly through its retail and design initiative, Sister by Studio Ashby. Founded in 2020 by Sophie herself, Sister is  both a curated shop and a creative space hosting an Artist in Residence programme featuring four talented female artists from around the world. 

“Supporting women artists is a true passion of mine,” Ashby explains. “Bringing some of my favourite artists into the inspiring world of COS has been a wonderful experience. These works feel alive in the spaces.”

But this isn’t COS’s first cultural rendez-vous. The brand has a well-documented history of folding art into its retail DNA. Back in 2022, COS partnered with photographer and artist Lea Colombo on a capsule collection and immersive exhibition at its London store, where Colombo’s dual-toned floral imagery blossomed across garments and walls alike. Even earlier, in 2017, COS joined forces with design duo Studio Swine for a mist-filled-bubble installation at Milan Design Week.

These past projects signal a clear vision, a curated, almost gallery-like retail approach telling the customer: We see the world the way you do. The retailer understands its culturally literate audience and excels at creating environments that resonate with the values and aesthetics of its customers.

London: Sculpting light with Milla Vaahtera

At COS Regent Street, Finnish artist Milla Vaahtera takes centre stage with a sculptural lighting installation. Best known for her Dialogue series, Vaahtera blends bold, blown-glass forms with slender brass elements in a process rooted in improvisation. Created in collaboration with glassblowers from Nuutajärvi Glass Village, her work is tactile, fragile, and alive with kinetic energy. Each piece is a conversation between tradition and experimentation, a fitting metaphor for COS' ethos.

Paris: Layered Landscapes and Quiet Tensions with Alice Neave and Erin Chaplin

On Rue Tronchet in Paris, two artists stage a visual duet. London-based Alice Neave works in a language of soft abstraction. Her paintings are made on unstretched fabrics like calico or found cloth, where mono-printing, pigment layering, and delicate mark-making give way to dreamlike scenes. These aren’t landscapes in any traditional sense, but emotional topographies, spaces that feel both foreign and intimate, drawn from subconscious textures and moods.

In dialogue with Neave is Erin Chaplin, a South African artist whose work is deeply personal and tactile. Her paintings use the decay of fruit and flowers as a metaphor for the fragility of human experience. The palette is often subdued, with flashes of unexpected colours that feel both lush and disconcerting. Chaplin’s still-life compositions speak to a certain surrealism, collapsing the line between the organic and artificial, the beautiful and the uneasy.

Helsinki: Weaving Form and Feeling with Dalia James and Anna Ilsley

In COS’ new Helsinki flagship, the focus shifts to texture and embodiment. Dalia James, a London-based textile artist, brings woven precision into the space. Her work, anchored in the theories of Josef Albers and the ethos of William Morris, is a calculated play of colour, geometry, and rhythm. James is less concerned with decoration than with communication: her textiles are architectural, each line and hue a deliberate statement on balance, tension, and movement.

Alongside her is Anna Ilsley, based in Suffolk, who offers a more visceral response to the body and its cultural framing. Her oil paintings explore the emotional terrain of motherhood, unapologetically fleshy and unfiltered. The figures she depicts are raw, mythic, and alive, embracing the maternal and the erotic in equal measure. The canvas becomes both constraint and sanctuary, supporting figures that resist simplification.

Visit COS and Studio Hashby’s in-store installations on London’s Regent Street, Paris’s Rue Tronchet and Helsinki’s Aleksanterinkatu.