Nick Knight on his NFTs of Jazzelle Zanaughtti and the metaverse

i-D - Joe Bobowicz (2022)

 
 

The legendary image-maker discusses ikon-1, his first NFT project, and why he thinks fashion's future is digital.

Uh-oh! In true (late) late capitalist fashion, yet another three-letter acronym enters our lexicon before we have even fathomed its basic meaning, let alone its ramifications. But luddites, we are not. Touted by venture capitalists and art historians alike as an emancipatory godsend that would decentralise the commodity market, the NFT has also fallen a little short. Glitchy graphics, tacky art and, above all, a slightly tired conversation about what the fuck it actually is remain perennial topics across media outlets and dinner tables the world over. Don’t close your Ethereum account, though. Sending tech-bro jargon packing, the man that brought you live fashion broadcasting and augmented fashion realities is here to rescue the medium.

All too aware of the threats it faces, legendary image-maker Nick Knight has invested the past three years into designing over 8,000 soon-to-be-minted NFTs in the image of Chicago-born model and creative wunderkind Jazzelle Zanaughtti. Replete with more than 200 individual traits, each artwork is an avatar of Jazzelle clad in ethereal digital fashion designs from 30 different creatives, plus bespoke hairstyles and nail designs.

Hot on the heels of Gaga’s Chromatica ball and a commission for Björk’s latest music video, Nick delivers his ‘ikon-1’ project to the blockchain, continuing a legacy of pioneering visual culture that dates back to his earliest covers for i-D. To see in this new milestone, we caught up with the legendary photographer himself.

How did this ‘ikon-1’ project come about?
In lockdown, a lot of people turned to me and said, “Okay, we can’t physically correspond with each other, so how can we do it digitally?” That led to a lot of things. Burberry came to me, John Galliano came to me for Margiela, and we started looking at how to make a new space – I can’t even remember if we were calling it the metaverse then. Tom Wandrag, who I do all my CGI with, was saying, “Look, Nick, there’s a different way of producing fashion imagery. We should really look at the creation of avatars.”

Why was Jazzelle the right person for this project?
They are so good at creating different versions of their own image, working with a range of makeup, styling and hairstyles to produce this ever-changing self-image. I’ve used Instagram as my source of artistic discovery for 12 years or however long Instagram has been going, and I find amazing people on there. A lot of people dismiss it and say “Oh, it’s just about selfies.” It really isn't. It’s a Pandora's box of incredible talent. And Jazzelle was one of them. I also wanted to link this project to the real world fashion that I knew, so I asked Eugene Souleiman – probably one of the world’s best hairdressers – to come into the studio and create very touched-by-the-hand hairstyles. We worked with very physical materials, it wasn’t just hair. We were taking eucalyptus bark, feathers or honey. I needed something like that because digital can sometimes feel a bit removed. We scanned the hairpieces and then put them on Jazzelle’s avatar, mixing it up with their own makeup. Jazzelle would come into the studio, spend three or four days on one look, we’d scan it, and then start again. We then asked Marian Newman, a nail artist who I’ve worked with over the years, to create a series of individual nails.

Do you see your entry into the metaverse as a form of civilisation building?
Yes, but I’m not just trying to put it on my shoulders. It comes to all artists to engage with this. NFTs aren’t interesting by default, but the images you produce are. An NFT is just like sending an email or a text. It’s a delivery mechanism. The interesting thing is how we’re going to work in this new space. What limitations or lack of limitations our self-image will have. Fashion has always been about how you see yourself or how you present yourself. Also, as well as a new space, there’s a new way of working with information: AI is fundamentally changing the creative arts. If you look at something like Midjourney or DALL·E or Craiyon, you type a set of words into the AI, and it sends you back an image. I was watching somebody play a game the other day and the person they were playing against was a cardboard box. I’m like, “Okay!” I remember seeing a John Galliano collection going down the catwalk – when he did them all out of bits of cardboard like living children’s drawings – and thinking “Wow!” But this is what people are living now. You listen to the political debates, and they’re almost all based on the world that we’ve been inhabiting for the last however many 100 years. But this is a new world and those debates don’t apply to it. There’s no nationalism, national boundaries, gender boundaries. Unfortunately, a lot in this new digital space is being pushed by capitalism and the military. If we create a world which we’re going to inhabit, then you really want it created by artists, not by big business.

You were an early pioneer of fashion film, 3D scanning, livestreaming and artificial intelligence, which were encountered with hesitance at the start. Is there a parallel between then and now?
I mean, we’re quite used to 3D scans, but when I first started scanning back in 1998, I’d never seen it before. It launched a whole new vision of what imagemaking is about. The energy around the moment now is very similar to when I first started SHOWstudio. It is probably the most exciting time that I’ve lived through. For the last 20 years, I've been saying I’m not a photographer, what I do now isn’t really photography anymore, because it’s just way outside of that. This new frontier offers a new way of being, which brings up much broader philosophical debates. Is there going to be an AI God? Is there law in the metaverse? Are there going to be police in the metaverse? I was talking to somebody – very interesting chap who works in AI – who was saying he’s actually created an AI prison. And it’s just basically a wallet, which you can’t get out of. It’s got no address.

Why do you think that the fashion industry might be might benefit from this arena?
Two good reasons. Fashion is probably the third biggest polluter on the planet. That has to be dealt with. The other reason is self-image: it’s exactly what fashion is designed for. One option is to take old clothes and repurpose them; another is to look at sustainability in clothing; another is to start saying, “Actually, where I really want to show my image is in the metaverse.” It’s just a recalibration of how we see ourselves. Fashion is about change, and so it shouldn’t be just doing the same thing it’s been doing for the last 70 to 100 years.

Do you see a lineage between your early image-making and what you’re doing now?
Any output you make, you can’t divorce it from who you are. You could say that while I'm looking through the camera lens, you know, I naturally go to what I think looks right – whether that’s putting the camera a bit lower or a certain lens. I might change the technique or I might change the material – recently, I’ve been working a lot with sculpture because I can work with materials like alabaster, titanium, wax or ice cream, even. But I’m still the same person. Take it back about 25 years, I was working mainly for magazines, and the Dior ads, which were magazine based – I couldn't make things out of ice cream and titanium. I couldn't create an avatar of somebody that walked down a virtual catwalk and changed shape from one end of the catwalk to the other, or their dress became chiffon at one end and went to satin in the middle and leather at the far end. It’s a new thing that I’m trying to do, but it’s still for me.

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