Nick Knight, the visionary architect of digital fashion shows

Five years ago, I asked the British photographer Nick Knight what the next “big thing” in fashion could be. His reply? “Virtual models. It sounds like science fiction — but it’s not that far off.” 

I dismissed the idea out of hand — yet Knight was already seriously investigating it. Jump to this June, when he released a film and ad campaign for Burberry’s latest Monogram capsule collection featuring Kendall Jenner — or rather, her digital likeness. 

Given the limitations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, Jenner couldn’t fly out for the shoot and couldn’t be professionally scanned in LA. So Knight asked her to take about 200 pictures of herself from every conceivable angle and vantage point, then worked with digital artist Tom Wandrag and a team of 3D specialists to “recreate” her. A model in a motion-capture suit then ran through a sequence of actions over which Jenner’s likeness was laid, resulting in motion images and stills of Jenner’s digital doppelgänger skateboarding or lounging in an environment that was also entirely computer-generated.

“It starts to look at the idea of what models really are: what are their physical and digital presences?” says the 61-year-old Knight, sitting at a safe distance from me in his west London photography studio. He is drinking tea from an arcanely dinky antique porcelain cup and saucer — arcane because we’re discussing rebuilding the world, one pixel at a time. “That for me is a very interesting step into what I think will be part of our futures,” he continues. “It’s how most motion films are being made.” 

Visionary is the adjective most used about Knight and his work. He has created some of the most memorable fashion imagery of the past 40 years, and not just for the pages of fashion magazines. He has given music videos by Björk, Lady Gaga and Kanye West the glossy elegance of fashion, and choreographed the livestream of Lee Alexander McQueen’s final fashion show in 2009 like a Hollywood spectacle.

It is striking that fashion designers are turning to Knight as something of a soothsayer, a master of the new and the next, to help them navigate these uncertain times. Brands have been forced to look beyond the industry’s traditional catwalk-centric communication methods in a period when those physical shows cannot be staged. And many have not only landed on Knight’s passion project — fashion film — but have asked him to help create their digital shows.

Necessity being the mother of invention, Knight was recruited by both Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino and Maison Margiela, helmed by Knight’s long-term collaborator John Galliano, to create innovative digital films in place of conventional catwalk presentations for their Autumn/Winter 2020 haute couture collections.

Both were distinctive: Valentino an elegiac blur of floral projections thrown across enormous dresses, poetically scored by the musician FKA Twigs; Margiela an engrossing, almost hour-long documentary unravelling the process of creating the collection through recorded Zoom calls, text messages, drone footage and a three-day shoot in a Cotswolds hotel instead of still-closed London photography studios. In the case of Valentino, the project was directed entirely by Zoom — including the on-site shoot at the vast Cinecittà Studios in Rome. 

These are just the latest converts to Knight’s love of moving image: he has worked with designers as varied as Hussein Chalayan and Gareth Pugh to create videos to present their collections; his short for Tom Ford featured a soundtrack by Lady Gaga. But there has never been such a general shift towards fashion film.

That said, computer-generated models are very different to films of real people really wearing clothes. To many, the former may sound disquieting, terrifying, dystopian even. To Knight, it sounds like an exciting new future. “Somebody told me last week that they only need five seconds of your voice to recreate your speech patterns. And only 15 minutes of visuals of you to recreate you,” he recalls. “We are living in the beginning of a totally new age of communication — not only communication, but how we relate to each other. Technology is already becoming part of us.” 

Knight calls himself an image-maker rather than a photographer because he pushes the possibilities of photography, creating pictures that look like paintings, crafting other worlds. His early work with digital retouching software such as Photoshop helped transform photography, especially in fashion. Some of his painterly images are being collected as fine art: in November 2016, his 1992 image of the model Tatjana Patitz, photographed for a Jil Sander campaign, sold at Phillips for HK$2.36m (£230,000), a record for a Knight piece.

In 2000, he launched a website, Showstudio.com, in part to showcase his ongoing experiments with film and the processes behind his work. Two cameras point at us during the course of the interview: Knight promises they aren’t recording, but you never know. When Showstudio.com launched, Knight recalls, the fashion industry didn’t understand the internet, or his fledgling website. He persuaded some friends — McQueen, graphic designer Peter Saville, stylists such as Katy England and Simon Foxton — to contribute.

There’s a billion different ways to create ideas and thoughts, so why is fashion nailed down to this method?

Where does Knight’s vision come from? He was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1958, though his father worked in the diplomatic corps, so he was also brought up in France and Belgium. He enrolled to study human biology at the Chelsea College of Science, before realising he had no interest in the science. His interest in people, however, propelled him towards photography, which he studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in the late 1970s.

During his time there he shot and published his first book, Skinheads, documenting his own experience as part of the British subculture. Today, Knight has shaved his head once again — and that book is still in print. Its arresting black-and-white images brought him international attention, leading to assignments with Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. “I started to discover high fashion through Yohji Yamamoto,” he says today.

It also led, ironically, to Knight’s huge passion for the kind of poised mid-century imagery being created around the time he was born. He is an admirer of Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton and Irving Penn — you can see the influence of all in his imagery, even when, in the 1990s, he pushed the medium of photography via computer-enhanced and sometimes entirely generated imagery that transmogrified McQueen models into human-animal hybrids, or refashioned Björk into a surreal warrior in Givenchy haute couture for her 1997 Homogenic album cover.

“Imagery was opening up in a totally new way,” Knight says. “It took about 150 years to get to the point it was when I first discovered it — then, almost overnight, it started to change into a totally different art form.”

That was in the early 1990s — a period of disquiet and uncertainty. We’re passing through turbulent times again — and Knight feels this shift towards film is once more changing fashion imagery into a whole new art form. To his mind, it reflects a general dissatisfaction across the industry vis-à-vis the limitations of the catwalk show.

“The people I’m working with, whether it’s Riccardo [Tisci, chief creative officer of Burberry] or John [Galliano] or Pierpaolo [Piccioli] . . . They have such a desire to do something new, and not just fit into this system which has been the same since the 1940s or beyond, where people walk into a room in a new dress, walk up and down and walk back out again,” Knight says.

“There’s a billion different ways to create ideas and thoughts, so why is fashion nailed down to this method — arcane, out-of-date, totally unsustainable, completely against the contemporary feeling of what we want to be as a world?”

Follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram to find out about our latest stories first