Fashion Pioneers | Nick Knight Says Heart and Mind are the Key to Fashion Imagemaking
LONDON, United Kingdom — Ten years ago at 19:27 GMT on 27 November 2000, at a time before streaming runway shows, before Facebook, before YouTube, before the rise of Web 2.0 itself, Nick Knight’s transformative fashion website SHOWstudio.com went live. Mr. Knight, a boundary-breaking fashion photographer, had considered the internet and saw something that others did not: where many in the industry saw only ugliness and risk, Mr. Knight saw the potential for emotion, connection and opportunity. Crucially, he also understood that digital — inherently active, social, transparent and restless — would fundamentally transform the “closed” fashion system and radically change the way fashion media was created and consumed. While others averted their eyes, Mr. Knight set about catalysing the revolution.
Last Friday, only hours before the 10th anniversary of SHOWstudio’s launch, BoF editor-in-chief Imran Amed sat down with Mr. Knight for the third installment of FASHION PIONEERS, a series of intimate live-streamed conversations between Mr. Amed and the industry’s most interesting operators.
As the conversation unfolded in front of a live studio audience of 200 people at London’s Hospital Club, thousands of others were participating in the conversation online, which at one point made “Nick Knight” a trending topic on Twitter. The Twitter conversation was in turn broadcast back to the studio audience on twin screens on either side of the stage, creating a integrated link between the physical and virtual audiences participating in the live event.
The interview explored Mr. Knight’s start in fashion, the genesis of SHOWstudio.com, the watershed moment of Alexander McQueen’s Plato Atlantis and the rise of fashion entertainment. (RSS and Email subscribers click here to view the interview).








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