BRIDGE TABLE OF CONTENTS Letter from the Director | 02 The words from the director of V&A Tristram Hunt
Empowerment | 03 The Story of Yves Saint Laurent and how he empowered women by Suzy Menkes
The Fabulous World of Nick Knight |
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Looking into Knight’s vision and aesthetic
The Millennial Designer Disrupting Modern Femininity | 12 The British designer Roberta Einer talks about her childhood, passion and inspiration
Calendar | Backcover Check out what’s happening in December 2019
D e cemb er 20 19
LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR As it opened its doors last month, The Fabulous World of Nick Knight has been the most sensational exhibition of this year. This issue digs a little deeper into the iconic, eccentric world of his photography. We are opening new exhibition “Yves Saint Laurent: EMPOWERED” on December 14th. What’s unique about this exhibition is that this is all about women’s empowerment. A respectable fashion journalist and critic Ms. Menks explained the story about how he redefined women’s wear. This issue also delivers the interview of the young, British designer Ms. Roberta Einer, who is having the Talk at The Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre on December 7th. Enjoy!
Tristram Hunt The Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
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T N E M R E W O P EM rent u a L t ear Sain w s e s ’ v n Y e H ow wom d e fin rede
By Suzy Menkes
Tuxedo worn by Danielle Luquet de Saint Germain. Spring-summer 1968 haute couture collection. Photograph by Peter Caine (Sydney).
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by coloring in the 1960s with Piet Mondrian’s graphic squares or embroidering Van Gogh paintings on a jacket, but by himself collecting fine art, with Bergé, and by having the first museum show of a living fashion creator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983. Every designer who now stages a retrospective display can trace the concept back to Yves saint Laurent. In almost any respect the Saint Laurent trajectory from half a century ago was the template for new generations of designers. He was ridiculously young—at 21—to be entrusted with the house of Christian Dior, after its founder died in 1957. Yet he invented what is now the norm: youth and cool. Yves Saint Laurent celebrated that both on the runway with an alligator biker jacket, inspired by Marlon Brando, and in his young life with a louche group of friends. Among the other 20th-century icons, Coco Chanel had been at pains to hide her humble origins and rackety early years, and Cristóbal Balenciaga and Christian Dior reveled in their role as stately couturiers. The Bergé/Saint Laurent partnership, openly, but never vulgarly, homosexual, became the pattern for other houses, even if Bergé would say waspishly to any young designer sighing for a mentor: “First, you need to be Yves Saint Laurent.” When they opened the Rive Gauche boutique, named for the then-anarchic Left Bank of Paris, Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent started another fashion revolution. It was the birth of luxury ready-to-wear as a democratization of haute couture. And every plate glass designer “flagship” across the globe today is rooted in that original 1966 concept.
“I don’t know if fashion is an art—but I know that fashion
Other early steps he made were noble and visionary: the first black model on
opening of an exhibition of the work of Yves Saint Laurent, the iconic couturier
collection; and of ethnic craftsmanship such as African beading transformed
needs an artist,” said Pierre Bergé last week, speaking in Montreal at the
the runway; the elevation of folklore as an inspiration with the Ballets Russes
and Bergé’s partner of 50 years.
with couture skills.
On Sunday night, after the death of Saint Laurent at 71 was announced,
Saint Laurent’s imaginative shows could also be said to have triggered the
Bergé made a bolder statement about the designer’s role in dressing women in a way that mirrored society’s new sexual freedom and gender role play.” He was a libertarian, an anarchic, and he threw bombs at the legs of society,” said Bergé. “That’s how he transformed society, and that’s how he has
runway madness that has led to parades of unwearable show-stoppers. Yet he always favored what he called “the silence of clothing” and bowed out in 2002 with these words: “I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion, which has been reduced to mere window-dressing. Elegance and
empowered women.”
beauty have been banished.”
France, which has been holding a month-long soul-searching over the 40th
The mantra that a new generation rejected was harmony. Yves Saint Laurent
anniversary of the May 1968 social revolution, has found a special significance in the passing of its fashion Sun King. No matter that Saint Laurent, dogged by ill health—mental and physical—had retired from fashion in 2002 saying that it was “the end of a long love affair.” Nor that Gucci Group, which bought the house in 1999, has already fielded two new designers and is stemming financial losses. “The greatest couturier in the world,” claimed Le Figaro in a banner headline, citing Saint Laurent’s contrasting characteristics of “rebellion and tradition, liberty and rigor” and, above all, “creativity.”
shows became a rigid ritual on the runway at the InterContinental hotel in Paris, never containing a note of the remixed cacophony of modern music. And as other designers explored deconstruction and asymmetry, Saint Laurent refused to accept that true fashion could exist without the harmonious cut, drape and color, of which he was an artistic master. For all the pop culture that he absorbed and harnessed in the 1960s and 1970s, and for all his success in inventing the way that modern women dressed, Saint Laurent’s yearning was for the past, and especially for his mother as a
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had added an extra order of merit to Saint Laurent’s Legion d’Honneur in December 2007, endorsed the idea that the designer was a national treasure. (Even if that same designer had once been vilified for embracing a fashion vision of the Vietnam War, for showing breasts
1940s belle in the family’s colonial home in Algeria. Although in his close circle, Paloma Picasso and his muse Betty Catroux both claimed credit for inspiring the 1940s wartime silhouette that he reworked, causing shock and outrage in French society, he himself insisted that it was a tender interpretation of his
through transparent clothing and for introducing a perfume called Opium.) “He
childhood memories.
was the first to elevate haute couture to the rank of art —and that gave him
The irony is that as his health faded and he himself disappeared entirely from
global influence,” Sarkozy said.
public view, the designer’s legacy became not just revered, but revived.
From the Yves Saint Laurent stable came clothes that we now accept as women’s wear classics: the pantsuit, peacoat, the blazer, the safari jacket and the tuxedo—as well as evening clothes that were as soft and gentle as the tailoring was sharp and linear. But the real importance of Saint Laurent—and the reason why his death has sent a frisson through even those who knew only the respectable and respectful later years—is that the designer not only broke the mold. He also remade it. The shape and texture of high fashion today owes as much to Saint Laurent as do those women who were given the unisex freedom of a pantsuit—from Bianca Jagger in her wedding attire, through Catherine Deneuve in her “le smoking” tuxedo to Hillary Clinton in a female politician’s uniform. It was indeed Yves Saint Laurent who equated fashion with art, not just
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Designers such as Marc Jacobs looked to Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970 glory years for inspiration. John Galliano backed off from the inspired frenzy of his revival of the house of Dior and sent Carla Sarkozy, the president’s new wife, on a state visit to London in elegant coats and pants that followed the pattern of stylish elegance first set out by Saint Laurent. In an era of corporate couture and fast fashion, there has not been much time or space for grace—the essence of the spirit and soul for which Saint Laurent will be remembered. As Sarkozy himself put it: “Yves Saint Laurent infused his label with his creative genius, elegant and refined personality ... because he was convinced that beauty was a necessary luxury for all men and women.”
BRIDGE | December 2019
Yves Saint Laurent and his assistant Claude Licard judging the effect of a fabric worn by Heather, 11 rue JeanGoujon, Paris, December 1961. Photograph by Pierre Boulat.
“He was convinced that beauty was a necessary luxury for all men and women.�
Yves Saint Laurent and Catherine Deneuve in his original Le Smoking, 1966, Corbis Images.
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Shalom Harlow for Luis Vuitton, 1666.
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BRIDGE | December 2019
NICK KNIGHT
THE FABULOUS WORLD OF
Digital manipulation, unconventional models, streaming shoots live on the net – Nick Knight has torn up the rule book on fashion photography. Susannah Frankel meets a shock tactician Article by Sabrina Jones
Photography by Nick Knight
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The most brilliant thing about photography is that it’s a
passport into any social situation whatsoever,” says Nick Knight. “It’s a ticket to photograph the President of the US, or a heroin addict in Camden, or a prostitute in Paris, or the biggest recording star in the world. Becoming a photographer is a way of finding out about people—finding out about life—and
experiencing what they experience.” Over the past 40 years, Knight has given the world—and the world of fashion in particular—some of its most arresting, inspiring and innovative imagery. From capturing the extraordinary early designs of Yohji Yamamoto to the equally remarkable curves of a young Sophie Dahl, from still lives of delicate flowers to Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Gisele Bündchen and a galaxy of glossy stars— this restless spirit has challenged preconceptions of what is possible, or indeed beautiful, both technically and aesthetically. Today, the first major retrospective of Knight’s work is published in book form and a lovely affair it is too. As well it might be. Knight gave up his summer holiday to go to China and oversee the printing—an example of his fanatical attention to detail. “I can tell you, it wouldn’t have looked like this if I hadn’t,” he laughs. It is one of his more admirable characteristics that this near-pathological precision might apply equally to a film he is making for an up-and-coming young designer who’s as poor as the proverbial church mouse as it might to a global advertising campaign that will appear on billboards in New York, Tokyo or Beijing. It’s not all about money. In central London, meanwhile, an exhibition celebrating the 10th anniversary of his pioneering website, Showstudio.com, is in full flow at Somerset House. Contributors to the site are varied: as well as just about any designer/model/ photographer/stylist worth their credentials, artists, musicians and film directors all feature. At the exhibitio, visitors are met by a larger-than-life-size sculpture of the aforementioned Ms. Campbell, and enter a highly interactive world that does much to explode the myths behind a largely impenetrable industry—which guards its privacy just as Knight strives to demystify it. “Showstudio really came about because I thought my life was very interesting and very exciting,” he says today. “And I couldn’t believe that nobody else could see the things that I was seeing. That sounds very arrogant but it’s not meant to be. Back in 1986 when I was photographing a very young Naomi and she was dancing to Prince in a bright red Yohji Yamamoto coat inspired by the collections of Christian Dior, I thought it was just so thrilling. It was a piece of contemporary theatre and it was seen by no more than around seven people. Fashion is such a fascinating world and if one could show the research that
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“ I never feel that I fully understand anything, and that motivates me to keep trying. ”
goes into a John Galliano collection, for example ... It’s missed. Fashion is presented as something for the ladies or as trade. It’s both scandalized and trivialized and it’s a lot more interesting than that.” If they pick their time carefully, visitors to the exhibition will be able to witness Knight shooting for British Vogue first-hand in a studio set up for the duration. At any moment, they will be able to watch fashion films that range from the quietly contemplative—some of the world’s most fêted models are captured by webcam sleeping peacefully in a hotel bed, for example—to the rather more vigorous: the stylist Katy England and her husband, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie strip and change into each another’s clothing before our very eyes. “The internet is a very democratic medium,” Knight told me on the eve of Showstudio’s launch a decade ago. “I would have loved to have been there when Richard Avedon was shooting Dovima with the Elephants. Those great pictures that you see as one moment in time—but why not show the process, the really huge amount of work that has gone into achieving that?” As is often the case with even the most respected artists, Knight’s reasons for starting out on a career that would go on to become all-consuming were not entirely elevated. “I first picked up a camera in about 1975,” Knight says; he is 51 next month. “It was a family camera and the real reason I did it was because I wanted to photograph girls. I liked girls— it sounds really dumb, but then so did [Jacques Henri] Lartigue.” The fruits of any early interest, he says, are “these really embarrassing pictures that nobody will ever see” and his intention, at that time, was to embark on a career not as a photographer but as a doctor, the first step of which was to Debra Shaw in Alexander McQueen, 1997.
enroll for a course studying human biology at the Chelsea College of Science, then part of London University. “I spent all of my teenage years assuming I
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“My aim has always been to what is and isn’t beautiful wanted to be a doctor, but when I got to college I realized that, in fact, and
The birth of digital photography and the power of Photoshop image manipula-
almost too late, I had no interest in studying sciences whatsoever. I was kicked
tion, in particular, have only fuelled the public’s suspicions where any so-called
out after a year.” Not long after that Knight found himself studying photography
distortion of reality is concerned. “But it’s just a way of having more control,”
at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, graduating in 1982.
Knight argues, “and a lot more possibilities. It’s a way of exploring the parame-
His first major project was to document skinhead culture. “It was a rites-of-
ters within an image which is extremely exciting.”
passage thing,” he says today of the images that project spawned, “a reaction
It would be all too easy for a photographer of Knight’s status to rest on his lau-
to my white, middle-class background.” It wasn’t long before he was seduced
rels, but the opposite is the case. While there are those of his profession who
by the rather more obviously glamorous arenas of celebrity portraiture—The
mourn the passing of the printed photographic image, Knight simply sees tech-
Psychedelic Furs, Bridget Fonda and Joanne Whalley were amongst his earliest
nological advancement as an opportunity to advance with it. “You have to kill off
subjects—and, more significantly, designer fashion, then beginning to realize
your darlings,” he says, “because once you find something you love it’s wrong
the potential of its power. Central to everything that Nick Knight touches is a
to keep working with that. I tend to move on. That’s partly just because it seems
rejection of the great myth that the camera never lies. “What’s a reality?” he
like an interesting thing to do. I never feel that I fully understand anything,
asks. “Where do you start? When Roger Fenton went out to the Crimean War to
and that motivates me to keep trying. If you always work with the same tools, the
show the reality of the battlefields, he ended up dragging around the corpses
same teams, the same ideas, it’s like not being able to see a problem from
to make a better composition.
another side. There’s a certain amount of deliberate letting go that I have to
Originally, photography was seen as a better recorder of truth than painting— that’s the reason why it became popular. It’s taken us 100 years to realize that actually that is not the case and neither should we want it to be. Photographers aren’t machines that have no feelings and no opinions, they’re storytellers; they manipulate the reality in front of them to tell you something interesting about it—and that holds true of everyone from Diane Arbus to Helmut Newton. That’s why we keep looking at their work. The whole idea that photographers today are a bunch of deviant misfits producing pictures of people that somehow twist the truth in a malevolent way is ridiculous. Which camera, which lens,
do when I take on a project, because, if you’re too much in control, you don’t find out anything about yourself—you know what you’re doing too well. There’s that moment where you need to be discovering things by instinct—and you only really ever discover anything by instinct: when you’re lost and you’re having to fight your way back to be found again. If you don’t do that, things become a bit too predictable.” The one thing that unifies Knight’s work is an admiration for his subjects. “I tend to want to look up at people as opposed to look down at them,” he explains. “My starting point is never critical. My political views are far from fully formed.
which lighting, which angle you choose to shoot a subject from—all these
All I know is that I view all people as equal. If you attack people, moralize and
things are crucial to the way that subject will ultimately be perceived.”
lecture them, you tend to get a lot of hostility back. I’d rather just show that there might be a better way of being.”
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Top left: A shot from a short film Reality Inverse, 2019. It was
The men and women in particular in a Nick Knight photograph or film are, more often than not, idealized, or at least seen in their most inspirational form. That is not to say that he is responsible for adding to the deluge of super-
created by Maison
glossy fashion imagery which is ultimately unattainable and therefore alienating.
Margiela’s creative
In the 1990s, Knight photographed Sophie Dahl—a figure distinctly on the large
director John
size given the stick-thin prototype model who tends still to dominate. He cast
Galliano and Nick Knight as new visual conversation. Bottom left: A piece from a SHOWstudio project Dolls, 2000. Knight’s prints of a model styled by Camille Bidault Waddington were drawn by toddlers. Bottom riught: Jazzelle Zanaughtti for Stern Magazine, 2016. She was discovered by Knight via Instagram.
models aged in their 60s and 70s, black and white, for a ground-breaking campaign for Levi Strauss. In Dazed & Confused, meanwhile, he offered up images of a group of people with physical disabilities. “My aim has always been to push at the boundaries of what is and isn’t beautiful,” he once told me. “Instead of our perception of beauty opening up, it’s becoming more narrow all the time. To make money, the industry is increasingly catering to the lowest common denominator and, as far as the people who run the big companies are concerned, anything even slightly out of the ordinary frightens people. But anyone with a brain knows that it is the quirkiness and imperfection in a person that attracts other people. That is completely obvious to human beings; it’s just when it gets to a corporate level that it all falls apart.” Over and above any ethically-informed motivation, however, the most important aspect of a Nick Knight photograph or film is his complete engagement with its creation on every level and from start to finish. “From the moment I conceive an image to the moment it is completed, every step along the way, I am interacting with it, changing it, pushing my thoughts and beliefs on to it,” he says. “That’s as it should be. We want our artists to be thoroughly involved with their work and thoroughly in control of their craft, surely. We want them to have something to say.”
push at the boundaries of .”
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BRIDGE | December 2019
By Alex Williams
The
Millennial
Designer
Disrupting Modern
Femininity ROBERTA EINER TALKS ABOUT HER PASSION, CHILDHOOD, AND INSPIR ATION
The designer Roberta Einer at her London studio. Photograph by Meara Kallista/HYPEBAE.
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m
“It was like, if something was ‘ bad taste,’ we need to add d a b
Roberta Einer creates experimental, fun and luxury womenswear with a focus on textiles and traditional couture techniques. Playful embellishments and hand-embroidery decorate specially sourced fabrics to create One of her passion
her daring more-is-more, feminine aesthetic. Named as One to Watch by
embroidery; she
NEWGEN in 2015, in 2016 she was selected as a winner of Saks’ inaugural
always looks for new techniques and applies them on her garments. Photograph by Meara Kallista/HYPEBAE.
Emerging Designer Showcase competition. Her innovative designs have been featured in the likes of American Vogue, ELLE, Teen Vogue, Dazed & Confused, HUNGER and i-D Magazine. Roberta Einer now has a worldwide distribution in department stores and boutiques such as Saks, IT, Shine, Fourm, Hanstyle amongst others. We know you spend a large amount of time drawing and sketching out your designs initially—could you tell us more about that? It kind of comes in steps, for example, if I see a beautiful color combination, even in a painting or when I travel, I will take a close-up photo of it. And I’m like “Okay, I’ve never seen those clouds next to each other—let’s try something with that.” Once we start designing the embroideries and things, It goes to drawing and scanning colors. You’re going to completion and then going back and kind of building. You have to hand-paint all of them like Pantone color cards because then the same hand-painted color cards go to every factory that I work with and they will match it with that. Sequins get dyed in the bath in one by one color, which is amazing. We get these perfect matches, which I’m really geeky about. You were born in and grew up in Estonia. Slavic society was really heavily influenced by Americana at the time—did that inform your aesthetic? I’m obsessed with research. I’m obsessed with finding out why things are the way they are. I grew up in a time just after the Soviet Union in Estonia. I have an older sister who, all she wanted to do was dress in Levi’s and cool trainers and it was just stuff that we didn’t have. She wanted to have cool scrunchies— she used to cut strips out of socks and dye them. It was like there was so much creativity at that time: you were figuring out how to do stuff that was like Western fashion. It made you really creative but it also made you crave to have those things. Nobody had sequined dresses. Nobody had ever seen what the disco era was because it wasn’t a thing in the Soviet Union. It was kind of
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the curiosity towards the brands that weren’t available I guess that drove me. If I find out something new that I know nothing about, I’m like “Okay, I need to find out more. This is so exciting.” It definitely comes through in your work. You also worked with McQueen, Balmain and Mary Katrantzou—they’re all very out-there designers. Have you always had that kind of outré design sensibility? No. In university, for the first three years, I was just doing black and white, wool, silk, very delicate things. Pulling threads out one by one to make a different fabric. At that point what was cool was the Nordic minimalism. I had never really worked for a designer who did something different, so I wasn’t really aware of the options that are all out there. Once I started with Mary Katrantzou, we were hair-spraying some crystal mesh and hand-felting through it and hair spray held it together for the showpieces. I went to Balmain and it was like,
ore.” nothing was enough. It was like, if something was “bad taste,” we need to add more. You don’t question taste anymore, you’re like “Wow, how is this made?”
It gave me all of these new kinds of elements to design that I wasn’t even aware
of and for me, it became about the elements and fun and like rediscovering.
Every season I’m looking for embroidery techniques that I’ve never seen or new ways to make things, new ways to work with materials.
Travel clearly forms such a huge part of not just your design inspiration, but also the actual process of how your clothes are made.
All the elements come from different places. We use really beautiful mills in
Sequin artworks handmade by Einer
Scotland to do our linen and denim and then we dye our fabrics in Italy and I do
on the wall in her stu-
some of the knitwear in Italy. Some of the old, sweet grannies in Estonia are
dio. She is “geeky”
crocheting flowers and seashells and things like that for our knitwear. With that,
about colored
I feel like I’m giving back at least a little to the place that I come from. We do
all the embroidery in India, which gets sent back to London. At the end of the
day, actually, everything is made in London.
sequins, which are dyed one by one. Photograph by Meara Kallista/HYPEBAE.
It comes to research, it’s so easy to be looking at the same reference, especially in an amazing city like London. You kind of have to go out and you have to bring in something that gives people something they haven’t seen yet. We get
so overwhelmed with information, it’s hard to excite people anymore these days. This season, you’ve collaborated with Christian Louboutin on footwear, Fittingly, your SS20 collection is travel-orientated. Could you tell us a little more about the concept? I read this funky article last season about the psychological side of how we dress for holidays. So it was like, it has nothing to do with how we dress otherwise. It almost has nothing to do with where we’re going. But it has everything to do with the idea of who we’re going to be in our head on that holiday. So if you go to a city, you imagining you’re going to be this Dolce & Gabbana ’90s model with lace underwear and big gowns and big hats. If you go to Paris, you
which is amazing. How did that partnership come around? We met with the team accidentally at the BFC’s London Showrooms in Paris. I had a really nice conversation with this man and he gave me his card and he was like one of the main guys at Louboutin. We emailed and started talking and they were really excited about the embroideries and things that I can do and the fabrics I can make. I made a lot of promises and we delivered on our side and they were really amazing to work with. Even though I’m not so much of a high heels girl myself, it’s a bucket list thing to work with Louboutin.
have the idea you’re going to be this coffee-drinking, smoking French girl wearing all-black. It’s kind of the idea of romanticizing it and being really nostal-
This is now your ninth season showing at LFW; what have been some of
gic about it. The same way we think about our childhood, which is probably
the most challenging moments in that time?
the most painful time of our lives, but we look back and think about how it’s the
As most of our creatives and design team will say, it’s production. It’s insane
best time of our life. This humor behind it is something that I drew upon.
because you come from art school and you have never been taught how to run a business. That’s number one. Number two, you’ve been taught to be as creative as you can be but nobody taught you if you made one dress like that, you need to make 20 more. Where do you start? How do you grade your patterns? How organized do you need to be? I think that’s a place where a lot of people fail and a lot of people learn so much. For me, I’m quite a chaotic person so for me to be so systematized, it’s been a great challenge. What are some of misconceptions of a career as a fashion designer? Oh my god. People think fashion is just, like drawing a cute drawing. 80% of the time, you’re actually on Excel sheets, logging on to internet banking and fighting very delicate disruptions to factories. The rest of the time, you’re being a little bit creative. You kind of have to accept it and make the most of the time that you can be creative.
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7/21–12/27/2019
9/16–1/13/2020
Surrealism + Design
PUNK!
Yves Saint Laurent: EMPOWERED
The Fabulous World of Nick Knight
12/14–3/16/2020
11/13–2/16/2020
CALENDAR
EXHIBITIONS
TALKS
Victoria and Albert Museum Cromwell Rd, Knightsbridge London SW7 2RL United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 7942 2000 Email: hello@vam.ac.uk
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12/7 (Sat)
12/16 (Mon)
12/20 (Fri)
Roberta Einer: Fashion and New Generation
Mulberry: Tradition and Novelty
Looking Back 2019 with Imran Amed from the BoF
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