Jackie Knight: Finding The Meaning in Clothes That Have Already Lived

A new shirt can be too clean for the story. Jackie Knight knows that. Sometimes the better choice is the sweater with a little tiredness in the cuff, the coat that looks like it has survived five winters, or the dress that carries the quiet evidence of having belonged to someone before the character ever put it on.

That is part of why Knight keeps returning to vintage and secondhand wardrobe. Not because old is automatically better. Not because a thrifted piece is always more interesting. She uses it because clothing with a past can do something on screen that a brand-new garment often cannot. It can make a world feel less arranged.

“A secondhand piece already has a life in it,” Knight says. “Sometimes that history brings texture I could never create by buying everything new.”

Knight is a costume designer and stylist whose work includes commercials, music videos, film, and narrative projects. She has led wardrobe and costume design for globally recognized brands including Instagram, Apple, Amazon, Ford Motor Company, and OVO, and has styled work connected to major artists, including a Drake music video viewed more than 11 million times.

But the scale of a project does not change the question she asks first: What should this clothing say?

For Knight, sourcing is not a shopping task. It is part of the visual construction of the project. A jacket can bring age into the frame. A worn-in piece can help a commercial family feel as if it existed before the shoot day. A carefully broken-down garment can show time passing without calling attention to itself.

“I like clothing that gives the viewer information without explaining itself,” she says. “If something feels too perfect, it can take you out of the world.”

That instinct was especially important in her work on the Benjamin Moore campaign, where clothing helped support the story of a family across time. Vintage sourcing and breakdown methods gave the wardrobe a sense of use, allowing the clothes to shift with the people wearing them. The campaign received coverage from outlets including Marketing Dive, Little Black Book, Ads of the World, The Drum, and Ad Age.

The work was not about making the wardrobe look old for the sake of it. It was about making time visible.

“When you are showing people over years, the clothes cannot feel like they appeared that morning,” Knight says. “They need to hold a little history. They need to feel touched by the life around them.”

That same thinking carries into narrative work. Knight has been selected as costume designer for independent film projects that have received festival recognition and exhibition opportunities, including “Girl Found Dead,” which recently premiered at the Palm Springs short film festival. Another short film, “Bid 16,” was included in the Toronto International Film Festival. In film, she says, the patience required to build a world through wardrobe can be different from the speed of commercial work, but the attention to detail is the same.

On a production, a wardrobe rack can become a map of decisions: what can be reused, what needs to be altered, what already carries the right age, and what should never have to become waste once the job is done.

Vintage and thrift sourcing can help Knight find those answers in a way new purchasing often cannot. A piece may already have the right wear. Another may need distressing, tailoring, layering, or an unexpected pairing. The search itself becomes part of the creative process.

“You cannot always plan what you are going to find,” she says. “That is what I love about it. You have to stay open, and then suddenly there is the piece that tells you what the project needs.”

Her commitment to secondhand sourcing also comes from a practical concern: waste. Film, fashion, and advertising can generate enormous amounts of unused or barely used clothing. Wardrobe is bought, pulled, altered, photographed, returned, stored, or discarded. Knight does not see that as a small issue hidden behind the finished image. She sees it as part of the industry’s responsibility.

Whenever possible, she prioritizes vintage, secondhand, and thrift channels rather than purchasing new items. The choice can reduce unnecessary consumption while making the work more visually specific. For Knight, those two goals belong together.

“I do not think sustainability has to make the work less creative,” she says. “It can make the work more interesting because you are not starting from something blank.”

That belief fits her larger view of costume design. Knight is an analog person by temperament, drawn to handmade processes, human stories, and objects that carry evidence of use. She has described her love for vintage, uniqueness, and the kind of storytelling that comes from real people rather than computer-generated shortcuts. In her work, a garment’s imperfections are often the very thing that makes it useful.

The industry is moving through conversations around authenticity, sustainability, cultural specificity, and the role of AI in creative production. Knight aligns with the push toward more responsible and human-centered work because she sees clothing as part of how reality is represented.

“Fashion is evidence,” she says. “It shows how people live. I want the work to protect that human part.”

Her future goals reach beyond the frame. Knight hopes to start a donation-based charity within the styling community, one that would help redirect usable wardrobe from productions to people and communities in need. She has spoken about wanting to reduce waste by extending the life of clothing that might otherwise sit unused, especially when people in cold parts of Canada could use items like winter coats.

“I have more than I need in my own collection,” Knight says. “There are pieces that could still help someone. I want to find a better way for wardrobe to keep serving people after a production ends.”

That idea says a lot about how she sees the work. Clothing does not lose meaning when the camera stops rolling. A coat that helped support one project can later keep someone warm. A shirt pulled for one scene can continue its life somewhere else. A production’s leftovers do not have to become waste simply because the project has wrapped.

Knight still loves the speed of commercial work and the creative shift that comes with each new campaign. She is also drawn toward more feature film work, especially independent films, where wardrobe can live with a project over a longer arc. In both spaces, she returns to the same values: specificity, care, usefulness, and a refusal to treat clothes as disposable.

Jackie Knight’s work begins with what a garment can do for the screen. Increasingly, it also asks what the garment can do after the screen work is finished.