New Fashion Exhibition Features Nick Knight's Censored 'Crushed Car'

Having been closed for the past three years, MoMu, Antwerp’s fashion museum, reopens this month with two new exhibitions. E/MOTION: Fashion in Transition addresses fashion's inextricable ties to contemporary culture, and how clothes, however fickle they can be, are an undeniable indicator of the place and time from which they first came. Looking at the past three decades of fashion, the show also focuses on the ever-changing nature of the industry. It's no surprise then that the work of Nick Knight features. Always looking to challenge the status quo and how we can create and communicate as an industry, Knight launched SHOWstudio in 2000, and has been a pioneering force in live-streaming, 3D scanning and fashion film. Knight's approach to image-making has never shied away from the realities of the world, whether that be in his early documentary-style images of the Skinheads or SHOWstudio projects such as Political Fashion.

In 2002, the project Killed addressed fashion imagery released and withdrawn at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It includes an image by Knight taken for W Magazine's October 2001 issue styled by Jonathan Kaye and Simon Foxton, with Vivien Solari modelling, which never made it to press due to being deemed inappropriate for publishing at the time. 'I was told that "we don't think it's appropriate that we should celebrate fashion in these awful times'" Which is very strange because that is exactly what any terrorist would want to do...to disrupt the fabric of culture and change things,' says Knight.

The image is included in the new exhibition in the section 'Disaster'.

E/MOTION: Fashion in Transition is curated Kaat Debo and Elisa De Wyngaert, and runs until 23 January, 2022.

The exhibition also includes work by, amongst others Helmut Lang, Walter Van Beirendonck, Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela, Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano, Raf Simons, Molly Goddard, and Marine Serre.