A mind full of filthy ideas and creative brilliance: we visit Malika Favre

Sat smoking on her sofa, Malika Favre looks completely at home. The French illustrator’s east London flat, which doubles as her studio, is stylish in an unaffected way with pictures all over the walls, both her own and some by her cross-Channel contemporaries: a gorgeous drawing of Tate Modern by Thibaud Herem and a Jean Jullien beach scene above her bed. But all this – London, art, huge campaigns and big-name magazine commissions – was never part of her plan growing up; instead after leaving school Malika went to study quantum physics as the first step to becoming an engineer. “I drew all the time as a kid but I never considered it a job,” she says. “We had very little money so me and my brother grew up thinking, ‘ok, we are going to be rich’ and that’s why I went into science I think. It was a viable job where art wasn’t.” "If the proportions were not right in my drawings my mother would tell you they’re not right, even though I was six. So there was a lot of crying.”

• Malika Favre Malika describes her upbringing in the Parisian suburbs as eccentric – her mum was a hippy and a keen painter (“She did lots of unicorns”) and her dad, whom she calls “an anarchist, but a non-violent one” worked with troubled kids and then went back to university to study theology. “There were not many taboos. We could pretty much do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted,” she remembers. “They never went to a school meeting, didn’t care if I got good grades or bad grades. It was all up to me.” They were strict vegetarians and there was no TV in the house, although the family went to the cinema every week. “I couldn’t read yet but they always took us to subtitled films and they would murmur what they were saying to us. It must have annoyed everyone else,” she laughs. Her mum’s arty side meant that she made most of Malika’s clothes and she also encouraged her early love of drawing… in a way. “I think she was very harsh. If the proportions are not right she will tell you they’re not right, even though you’re six. So there was a lot of crying.” But her mum still has all her childhood drawings, which show a fertile creative imagination at work – a phase of bathtubs, then bathtubs in trees, then washing lines, and then girls, hundreds of drawings of girls. Jasper Clarke: Malika Favre Jasper Clarke: Malika Favre Drawing remained a hobby though until Malika realised, just four months into her quantum physics studies, that she’d made a mistake. But even then she didn’t have plans to be an illustrator, instead she went to art school to study graphic design and advertising – “I still wanted to make money!" She also loved the course, and its combination of conceptual thinking and creative skills. A visiting Farnham lecturer encouraged her to come to the UK to study her BA and the move appealed on two levels. “I didn’t feel ready to work, I felt very out of sync with the industry. And I had this Harry Potter fantasy – I wanted to dress up and have the little hat.” As an intense year at Farnham drew to a close she spotted Airside in Le Book and was immediately drawn to the work they were doing which spanned illustration, graphic design and advertising. “I didn’t consider myself an illustrator then, more of a sofa bed,” she says. During her three month internship at Airside she fell in love with the industry and fell in love with London. She remembers working really hard to impress her colleagues, so much so that when she left, Richard Hogg wrote in her goodbye card: “Thanks you for making me look like crap for three months.” The card came with a present, her very own Wacom tablet, which is still the one she uses today. "Coming to the UK I had this Harry Potter fantasy – I wanted to dress up and have the little hat.”
• Malika Favre A year or so later she bumped into Richard in the street who said he was leaving Airside and Malika immediately asked if she could have his job. This led to a “five-minute interview in the pub” and she stayed at the agency for five years, a period that was both very happy and incredibly formative. “The whole philosophy of what I do now came from Airside. They were simplifying things and I really learned to pare things down.” During this time she also worked on some freelance commissions for the likes of Wallpaper* magazine and personal work such as the Alpha Pin-Ups, an alphabet of cavorting lesbian lovers. “It reached the point where I felt I had enough of my own voice to put my name on things,” Malika explains. “I wanted to do my own thing and I couldn’t do enough of it at Airside.” And so the circuitous route to freelance illustration was finally complete. From posters for the BAFTA film awards and book covers for Penguin, to editorial illustrations for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, Malika’s style is a beguiling mix of sex and structure. The latter she thinks comes from her graphic design background, the former from her “filthy French mind.” “There is a lot of bad sex art, mainly drawn by men, and I have