"There are two big wrongs in the world – one is money and the other is fame"
"The fashion industry is collapsing – and when structures come down it’s for a reason – it is because it should no longer be standing."
Nick Knight has invited me in to his temporary premises in a basement in London’s Fitzrovia district. He and Winnie Harlow are about to say goodbye to each other – and she shows me a black T-shirt, which is transformed into a weapon against the paparazzi; when the flash hits it, the text "Fuck you cunt" lights up.
"There are two big wrongs in the world – one is money and the other is fame," says Nick Knight. "Celebrity is created solely from capitalist causes – an attempt to extract huge sums of money from – well, a human being, who – you know – represents tremendous beauty or other qualities that we in Western culture regard as status. But we are all equal, and it is modern bullying when famous people are pursued by crowds." The reason that Nick Knight made this ‘Anti T-shirt’ was to problematise the paradox of fame: that we on the one hand acclaim individuals and put them on a pedestal, while on the other hand delight in pursuing them and watching them fall. "It was terribly painful for me to see Kate Moss and her daughter being hunted like prey at LAX airport (ed. 2008) – and I have since spoken to her many times about how I could help her to respond – I felt an urge to do it.”
According to Knight, during the 90s the fashion media became commercialised to such an extreme degree that it collapsed and could only be resurrected again by trying to wrest itself out of the hands of the possessive commercial framework that still preserves it as a business model and not a mode of expression. He was convinced that the standardisation of the fashion industry in the late 90s played out especially in three places: "in the print media, on the catwalk – as a showcase – and in a business model with the supermodel as a way of extracting economic value from fame." According to Knight, this development created a very narrow-minded body ideal, "but beauty is diverse – no two bodies are alike. Yet the media development has managed to tighten its gaze on the body ideal, to such an extreme degree that it has starved the dissemination of fashion – standardised it to one figure, one race, age and so on."
Imperfection as liberation
Over the last three decades, Nick Knight has stubbornly and insistently been fighting against this standardisation of body ideals and conventional beauty, from the early years with his book Skinheads and his collaboration with such designers as Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. "People contain stories and each body is unique. A woman’s body in her 50s carries a much deeper history – with impressions from life – for me it is far more beautiful than a fair-haired kind-of-Barbie-looking type," says Knight, as he shows me a photo of Caitin Stickels – "I found her on Instagram." He scrolls through the pictures on her profile, many of them taken in nature; in a forest, by a forest lake, on a cliff – Caitin Stickels is an elfin-like red-haired girl without wings, but with tattoos and a supernatural face – as if she were in the process of transforming herself from the underworld into reality. In some of the pictures it looks almost like her face is melting – intimidating and slightly scary, but most of all on the border between being dazzling beauty and painful ugliness.
“People fear difference on every level – so they strip away the variety. That is how a totalitarian state dominates its population – I can’t follow the logic: because it is different it is wrong – no, because it is different it is good."
He recounts other Instagram acquaintances such as the sexual-boundary-pushing Tessa Kuragi and the transsexual Hari Nef. "We don’t help ourselves by trying to hide the imperfect; it just makes it much harder. We are all born with sexual desires, and we are all born with natural nakedness. When natural nakedness is censored, for example due to nipples showing, it creates shame and a sense of being wrong. It creates inequality among the sexes – because it isn’t sexuality, but physiology, to have breasts. At the same time it gives an impression that sex is wrong and sinful – it sends a message to women, to young women, that there is something wrong with their bodies. Sexuality and nudity is taken over by pornography – a sex for money kind of view. Then pornography becomes the view of sexuality and other views of sexuality are non-sexual. A political thing that seems to come a lot from America – I hate to talk about one country as a culture – but it seems that this double standard has become a value system defining western culture. Some people are so religiously bound up. That does more harm than good. We are in very great danger of harming ourselves by making ourselves feel very unhappy as a species – I think instead we should celebrate the incredible species we are. I am totally confident that human beings will become better and better.”
Deconstruction of cultural genes
Knight has always explored the boundaries – and fashion as a medium for deconstruction – an opportunity for a showdown with prescriptive hierarchies and social control. His photo documentary book and début publication Skinheads follows a subculture’s emergence from the 60s to its revival in the mid-70s. It depicts the expression of power in a subculture. Since his début as a photographer, Knight has gone his own way – he has a unique ability to capture the deconstruction of cultural genes and the creation of new symbols of rebellion against established mainstream structures – as they happen! He finds himself on the edge of what is potentially new – that which is not there yet but in rebellion on its way to a new idea, a new agenda. Over the years, SHOWstudio has initiated many controversial undertakings, all of them with fashion as the focal point and an insistence that fashion photography needs to have an artistic vein, a political errand – not party political, but a political nature – a rebellion and a stance in time and context. ”SHOWstudio was born out of frustration and a need to restore fashion as the place where the body and contemporary symbolism intersect, not as just a commodity with sex appeal.”
It was crucial for the counter-cultural currents – such as skinhead subculture in the 70s – to break with the existing norms. In the 70s, the concept of normality all in all became the subject of much attention. People were especially interested in examining how conformism and social norms were imposed upon the individual in the form of narrow body ideals. As part of this, the fashion industry was heavily criticised as being responsible for the objectification of the female body. Women burned the bra and flaunted their nakedness. "It was a time when, for a while, nakedness was set free," says Knight. But it wasn’t long before commercial ties captured it again – sex appeal could sell everything from perfumes to cars or soft drinks. ”Due to the commercialisation of the body, western society sees sexuality and nudity as a commodity. In this perspective it has become something that is right when it is retouched perfection in an ad, or something that has to be censored because it is pornography and therefore wrong.” But in this calculation something crucial has been overlooked and, according to Knight, that is: Art and the natural body.
It is the same movement that reappears for the 80s punk period. The Clash, The Ramones and The Sex Pistols led the anarchist culture war. Both punk music and the subculture it spawned were about destroying conventional ideas of good taste and body ideals. Studs, piercings and mohicans were symbols of rebellion. It was about experimenting with ugly utterances and false notes; daring to be ugly and being an outsider. This aesthetic of ugliness has been embraced by fashion time and again, most recently with the grunge wave of the 90s and the Tumblr aesthetic and cyber feminism’s counter-cultural showdown with Insta-retouched perfection in the 10s. Trends loop, history repeats itself and Nick Knight is always right there – in the middle of the loop – his art is kept going by a constant driving force and an insistence on a showdown with the established trend. He wants to restore fashion as an artistic comment on time – capturing the political nature of the present moment.
To the question of whether the muddy censorship methods of the social media affect him, Knight responds: "Yes it affects me – because I’ve been upset about it. The only good thing is that it is actually forcing people to be cleverer to be more creative – censorship becomes an artistic dogma.” He sees a general problem in that it is the major corporate interests that dictate the framework – that it is economic interests that define the content. He sees new technology, paradoxically, as a tool of rebellion against the very same power structures:
"Some of what I’ve been preoccupied with is that the internet has removed unnecessary intermediaries, so there is direct contact between the artist and the audience. This has created an artistic freedom. A media form like Instagram has made it possible to create connections in a way that has been incredibly inspiring and rewarding for me. For example, I cast exclusively via social media, because when I look at their profiles, I see a whole person – their interests, but also what makes them unique, what is important to them and what they want to communicate to the world. So without doubt the internet and especially social media has broken the hierarchies and I would say that we have got the art back in fashion because people work more intuitively and released from commercial interests that obstruct creativity."
Nick Knight, Director of SHOWstudio.com, is among the world’s most influential and visionary photographers. As a fashion photographer, he has consistently challenged conventional notions of beauty and is fêted for his groundbreaking creative collaborations with leading designers including Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen. Advertising campaigns for the most prestigious clients such as Christian Dior, Lancôme, Swarovski, Levi Strauss, Calvin Klein or Yves Saint Laurent as well as award-winning editorial for W, British Vogue, Paris Vogue, Dazed & Confused, AnOther, Another Man and i-D magazines have consistently kept Knight at the vanguard of progressive image-making for the past three decades.. Read more on SHOWstudio.com