Fashion Revolution: Performance

Banquet, 2004

Heston Blumenthal, Ed Griffiths

A commission from W Magazine to photograph luxury evening-wear from the Autumn/Winter 2004 collections provided the context and budget for Nick Knight and SHOWstudio.com to broadcast a lavish fashion performance, based around a twenty-three course banquet cooked by the molecular gastronomer Heston Blumenthal. During the five-hour transmission in May 2004, webcams were positioned away from the faces of the twelve fashion and celebrity guests being photographed for the magazine, to conceal their identities prior to publication. Instead, the live cameras were trained directly above each place setting so that SHOWstudio.com viewers, watching online, were left to deduce the names of the cast from tantalising glimpses of them consuming each course. Meanwhile, the increasingly outrageous conversations, picked up via the many hidden microphones at the table, provided additional clues to the mystery diners that included Gemma Ward, Andreas Kronthaler, Aimee Mullins, NOKI, Dita von Teese and Liberty Ross. This installation contrasts what SHOWstudio.com viewers could witness online during Banquet—film edits of each course, together with the audio recording—with what readers of the September 2004 issue of W Magazine could see afterwards—Nick Knight’s reportage shots of the banquet taking place. The difference in appearance between imagery captured for print and online purposes gives a revealing picture of the disparity between the two fields of fashion image-making during this period.

Fash-Off, 2006

Gareth Pugh

Fash-Off witnessed controversial young designer Gareth Pugh using the SHOWstudio.com live platform to stage a series of performances that capture his perspective on sensationalism, glamour and spectacle. At the heart of the project was the creation of a giant, improvisatory image and film using silver foil, balloons and twenty models, styled by Nicola Formichetti, filmed by Ruth Hogben and photographed by Nick Knight. Pugh also made a film or two each day over the period of five days, all representing his attitude towards his whirlwind fashion career thus far. The broadcasts focused on themes of boredom and repetition, artifice and easily-dealt acclaim, and were preoccupied with transformation. While make-up artist Alex Box encrusted Pugh with mirrored discs and transformed him into a human disco ball, hair stylist Eugene Souleiman metamorphised him into a big, black show poodle. Meanwhile, the designer filmed himself making up his own reflection in the mirror: trapped in never-ending face painting. On close inspection the short films, made in the low-fi aesthetic of the YouTube generation of filmmakers, expose darker themes of exploitation and the designer’s antipathetical relationship with the fashion system in which he works. The wider project also included a design_download paper pattern design, demonstrating the new, technologically-driven possibilities of reach for a young fashion designer with no financial backing, operating within a global market.

Freedom of Love, 2004

Brad Pitt

Nick Knight used André Breton’s poem Freedom of Love as the guiding text for this short film of Brad Pitt, made while shooting the actor for a special issue of Vanity Fair magazine in 2004. The photographer created a number of intriguing scenarios for Pitt to perform, so as to engage the actor in deliberately self-reflective performance. The preamble began in a photo booth set up in a studio in Los Angeles, where Knight asked Pitt to take his own passport photograph and then write over the resulting prints, which were blown up to 3 x 4 metres. Knight then filmed Pitt energetically painting onto the huge blow-up of his own face and adding captions while reciting Breton’s poem, a one stanza, sixty-line homage to the poet’s wife. Dissolving between the actor’s projected image, his actuality in the studio, and his self-painted image on backdrop paper, the film is a meditation on image and celebrity, and on an actor’s response to the way he is seen by others.

Sleep, 2001

Nick Knight

Sleep is the earliest example of SHOWstudio.com’s live image broadcasting, produced in 2001 and utilising webcam technology to feed live stills of models as they slept in hotel rooms across the span of one night. By relying on the unconscious performance of the models, the photographer relinquished full control of the shot, leaving the direction of the model to natural consequence and chance. Nine top models, including Devon Aoki, Liberty Ross and Zora Star, were invited to sleep in a room of the Metropolitan Hotel, London, but dressed and groomed as if for a conventional photoshoot, by stylists Simon Foxton, Jonathan Kaye and Sidonie Barton. Wearing outfits by designers such as Boudicca, Roland Mouret and Yohji Yamamoto, and complimented by make-up, hair and manicures, the models were then laid out on a bed and asked to sleep. Their nocturnal twists and turns were transmitted to a global audience, who watched as the models unfurled and dishevelled in real-time, appearing to dance on air. The images were finally translated into a set of eight film shorts that capture the ethereal beauty of the reposes as vertical, moving friezes of drapery and female form.

Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down, 2005

Liberty Ross

Taking its cue from the title of one of Pedro Almodovar’s films about desire and control, Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down offered SHOWstudio.com’s viewers the chance to dress Liberty Ross in a live interactive photoshoot. The project was initiated as a response to the fashion industry’s overtly sexualised image, which gave rise to the term ‘porn chic’ and in no small part was fuelled by young beautiful models relinquishing control of their bodies and their image to the creative direction of the photographer, stylist and retoucher. Referencing live pornographic web chatrooms which had become widely available on the net, this project turned the proposition on its head by offering the model and the audience the opportunity to decide how she should dress and pose. For each of nine themed looks, chosen from a virtual wardrobe of items selected by stylist Jonathan Kaye, the online stylist had their outfit applied to Ross as she moved on a rotating turntable, whilst being photographed by Nick Knight. Broadcast as a live chatroom, the project captured the lively conversations that ensued between the guest stylists and Ross, keen to follow their every command – be it Lanvin pearls to the neck, or ‘hair au naturale’. The final looks were commemorated by multimedia artist Daniel Brown as striptease interactives inspired by saucy novelty pens of old. The multi-layered nature of Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down reflects the complicated nature of an industry that relies on sexual desire, segueing between the worlds of fashion and pornography to create a thought provoking commentary on both.

More Beautiful Women, 2000

Nick Knight

An explicit homage to Andy Warhol’s ‘Thirteen Most Beautiful Women’ (1964) screen tests, Nick Knight’s strategy for More Beautiful Women was simply to ask models to stand in front of the video camera for two minutes until told to stop. This ongoing film project evolved out of a straightforward experiment conducted by Knight during his editorial commission to photograph the most famous fashion models of the twentieth century for the Millennium issue of British Vogue magazine. The results featuring many iconic mannequins who had gone into retirement, such as Marisa Berenson, Pilar Crespi, Marie Helvin, Dorian Leigh Parker, Twiggy, Penelope Tree—as well as the most famous contemporary names—Kate, Gisele, Claudia, Linda, Naomi—are complex, varied and sometimes challenging. Rather than collaborating with Knight to create a series of summative, still pictures determined by the photographer’s vocal instruction and the sound of the shutter release, the models are denied the structure of the conventional fashion sitting and must therefore direct themselves. For some, the 120 seconds stretching ahead are evidently unbearable; others are completely at ease in front of the video camera. In the context of the fashion studio and away from the Warholian world of wannabe celebrity, More Beautiful Women poses questions about the act of modelling, and what happens to the fashion photograph when the photographer’s directorial control is removed.