As ‘Savage Beauty’ opens at the V&A, Nick Knight on his relationship with Alexander McQueen, his take on youth culture and meeting Kanye West.
Credit: The Wall Street Journal
Sitting at his desk surrounded by laptops and surveyed by a maquette of Kate Moss with wings, Nick Knight repeatedly calls himself an “image-maker”—but everyone else in fashion calls the 56-year-old one of the most influential photographers in the business.
As a young freelance snapper for London’s music press in the 1980s, Mr. Knight shot bands like Funkadelic and partied at the city’s colorful Blitz and Taboo club-nights. It was here that he encountered John Galliano, Leigh Bowery and the rest of London’s emerging countercultural elite, whom he photographed for magazines including i-D and The Face. He has shot scores of Vogue covers, and campaigns for everyone from Dior to Diesel, and in 2000 founded SHOWstudio.com, an ideas lab dedicated to his conviction that fashion’s future will be defined by film.
Credit: Business of Fashion
Today, he’s finalizing a portfolio of images shot 11 years ago with one of his closest collaborators, the late Alexander “Lee” McQueen. Five years after the designer’s suicide, and to mark this week’s opening of “Savage Beauty” at the Victoria & Albert museum, Mr. Knight is bringing to light “Black,” a previously unseen study of the creations the designer considered the best of his career. As he reflects on McQueen’s life, we caught up with him about their relationship, the changing nature of image making and the future of youth culture.
The first time I encountered Lee was at a Vogue Christmas party in the mid-’90s, at San Lorenzo. I am not much of a partygoer and I got the impression that Lee wasn’t, either. But you find your path to people whose work you admire. I was just getting up to leave—early, at half past 10 or whenever—and someone pointed him out. He was at his table, looking really grumpy.
Credit: The Wall Street Journal
The fashion world is not that big. Look at the Italian fashion designers who are all in their sixties or seventies. People don’t come and go as quickly as one might imagine because this a medium based on change.
When I was 12, I developed a schoolboy crush on my 14-year-old neighbor. It changed me profoundly because she was a skinhead. Suddenly I wanted to be a skinhead, too. Your teenage years are so crucial to shaping what you become later. It’s the time where you work out who you are. More than 40 years later I’m still that.
Credit: The Wall Street Journal
The idea [behind ‘Black’] was to recreate the end of Lee’s Voss show. I photographed 35 models, and Lee, and [choreographer] Michael Clark who opened the show, dancing with Kate Moss. They were spotlit from above, all pressed up against a pane of glass. Afterward, though, we never found the time to put the images together. They have sat in a box for 10 years.
Lots of photographs that I did of [McQueen] were about the pressures that he felt, how he wanted to articulate the feelings that he had. One picture is of him in a padded cell, in chains, hanging from his own flesh. There was another shot we did where his head was exploding. At the time I just felt it was more imagery. You look back at it with the sad benefit of hindsight and you can see that perhaps those cries were more heartfelt than we imagined.
He never seemed the sort of person who was going to take his own life. He always seemed so sure of himself and so tough, in a confrontational way. You felt he was going to take on anybody; the fashion world, the art world, anybody. He wasn’t frightened of anything.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.