I love making things that don't exist

Rhea Thierstein, aged 30, is responsible for putting a giant wasp in the hallowed vitrines of Selfridges.

"I love making things that don't exist," she says. "One day I'm designing a dinner at Claridge's, the next I'm making jellies with flowers in them, and then I'll be making a shed look like it's been exploded on top of a building. It's great!"

After working in three dimensions when she was at art college, Thierstein transferred to a photography course and gravitated towards fashion imagery. Aiming high, she took an internship at Nick Knight's website, SHOWstudio.com and began working with some of the industry's greats, such as Knight himself and the set designer Shona Heath.

"I realised that Shona Heath was behind a lot of the images I already knew well," she says. "I realised this is what I wanted to do. It's creatively so broad and fresh."

Thierstein went on to build the set for Vogue's Christmas party last year, as well as the heavily stylised backdrop to popstar Jessie J's video "Price Tag".

"There's an element of melodrama in my drawings," says 29-year-old Zoe Taylor, "but they are also ambiguous. I try and give them a dream-like intensity." In these dreamscapes, bouffanted femme fatales smoking cigarettes in Prada tweeds, or bestriding office chairs in a flat-pack shirt designed by Martin Margiela, are rendered in chalk pastels on newsprint paper.

Taylor's images combine all the sassiness and femininity of Old Hollywood stars with the more modern elements and iconography of high-fashion imagery.

These imaginative mise-en-scènes spring perhaps from Taylor's original interest in archaeology and anthropology, which she studied before starting her art foundation. From there, she took a course in illustration at Camberwell College of Art, before applying for the MA course at the Royal College of Art.

"I've always been interested in costume," she says, "and the way clothing can suggest a character and a story. For a while I wanted to be a designer, but it was really about drawing the clothes – I'm hopeless when it comes to cutting a pattern."