16 minute read
Empowerment
from Museum Newsletter
by MegumiH
“I don’t know if fashion is an art—but I know that fashion needs an artist,” said Pierre Bergé last week, speaking in Montreal at the opening of an exhibition of the work of Yves Saint Laurent, the iconic couturier and Bergé’s partner of 50 years.
On Sunday night, after the death of Saint Laurent at 71 was announced, 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 empowered women.”
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France, which has been holding a month-long soul-searching over the 40th 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.”
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 through transparent clothing and for introducing a perfume called Opium.) “He was the first to elevate haute couture to the rank of art —and that gave him global influence,” Sarkozy said.
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 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.
Other early steps he made were noble and visionary: the first black model on the runway; the elevation of folklore as an inspiration with the Ballets Russes collection; and of ethnic craftsmanship such as African beading transformed with couture skills.
Saint Laurent’s imaginative shows could also be said to have triggered the 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 beauty have been banished.”
The mantra that a new generation rejected was harmony. Yves Saint Laurent 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 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 childhood memories.
The irony is that as his health faded and he himself disappeared entirely from public view, the designer’s legacy became not just revered, but revived. 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.”
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.
Yves Saint Laurent and Catherine Deneuve in his original Le Smoking, 1966, Corbis Images.
Shalom Harlow for Luis Vuitton, 1666.
NICK THE FABULOUS WORLD OF KNIGHT
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
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
Debra Shaw in Alexander McQueen, 1997.
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 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
wanted to be a doctor, but when I got to college I realized that, in fact, and almost too late, I had no interest in studying sciences whatsoever. I was kicked out after a year.” Not long after that Knight found himself studying photography at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, graduating in 1982.
His first major project was to document skinhead culture. “It was a rites-ofpassage thing,” he says today of the images that project spawned, “a reaction to my white, middle-class background.” It wasn’t long before he was seduced by the rather more obviously glamorous arenas of celebrity portraiture—The Psychedelic Furs, Bridget Fonda and Joanne Whalley were amongst his earliest subjects—and, more significantly, designer fashion, then beginning to realize the potential of its power. Central to everything that Nick Knight touches is a rejection of the great myth that the camera never lies. “What’s a reality?” he asks. “Where do you start? When Roger Fenton went out to the Crimean War to show the reality of the battlefields, he ended up dragging around the corpses to make a better composition.
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, which lighting, which angle you choose to shoot a subject from—all these things are crucial to the way that subject will ultimately be perceived.” The birth of digital photography and the power of Photoshop image manipulation, in particular, have only fuelled the public’s suspicions where any so-called distortion of reality is concerned. “But it’s just a way of having more control,” Knight argues, “and a lot more possibilities. It’s a way of exploring the parameters within an image which is extremely exciting.”
It would be all too easy for a photographer of Knight’s status to rest on his laurels, but the opposite is the case. While there are those of his profession who mourn the passing of the printed photographic image, Knight simply sees technological advancement as an opportunity to advance with it. “You have to kill off your darlings,” he says, “because once you find something you love it’s wrong to keep working with that. I tend to move on. That’s partly just because it seems like an interesting thing to do. I never feel that I fully understand anything, and that motivates me to keep trying. If you always work with the same tools, the same teams, the same ideas, it’s like not being able to see a problem from another side. There’s a certain amount of deliberate letting go that I have to 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. All I know is that I view all people as equal. If you attack people, moralize and 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.”
Top left: A shot from
a short film Reality Inverse, 2019. It was
created by Maison Margiela’s creative director John 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.
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 superglossy fashion imagery which is ultimately unattainable and therefore alienating. In the 1990s, Knight photographed Sophie Dahl—a figure distinctly on the large size given the stick-thin prototype model who tends still to dominate. He cast 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.”
