V Magazine shares the ‘Cyber Couture’ fashion story, a masterly creation led by Nick Knight [IG] and the SHOWstudio audience. Anna Trevelyan [IG] joins the creative blockbuster with model Georgia Palmer as the center of attention./ Hair by Sam McKnight; makeup by Val Garland

Dania Curvy writes the script around process in technically creating the fashion story. It’s almost impossible to understand and appreciate the depth of complexity in the images on a phone — even an iPhone.

On any day of the M-F week, AOC’s audience is 60-65% laptop, a reflection of the commercial and professional creative credentials of our audience. These facts are a key reason why we are going so in-depth around the technical aspects of process of creating in ‘Cyber Couture’.

Curvy writes what is a well-deserved, promotional paragraph for SHOWstudio.

Call it fortune-telling or keen economic-trend forecasting, but Knight’s pioneering ability to adapt in the digital age has set the bar high for what would be, and still presently is, a major hurdle for artists, designers, and publications alike. Transferring art onto many mediums has never been easy, but digital obstacles present ever-new issues…which Knight seems to have been able to innovate his way around for decades. The emergence of SHOWstudio, an award-winning fashion website started by Knight in 2000, has been a resolute and revolutionary case study for relentlessly pushing the boundaries of how the world interprets and imagines fashion. In this way, SHOWstudio has invited the public to actively partake in an industry known for exclusivity.

A livestream of the shoot invited more than 40 “notable illustrators” as well as the general public, to sketch their own vision of Spring 2022 couture. A lighting technician then projected their artwork onto Palmer, already wearing key pieces from existing spring 2022 couture collections. Knight then snapped away at this fusion of creative inputs that transformed Georgia Palmer.

AOC put so much energy into understanding this project because I was convinced that we had a missing model [s] to identify. Uploads on Models.com are not known for always including the entire cast — the source of our exposure to the project. The deeper we went into the project, the more fascinating it became.

The resulting ‘Cyber Couture’ story emerged because everyone was ready to give up total control. Nick Knight elaborates for V Magazine:

I would say the premise of the shoot is that we are allowing the invited SHOWstudio audience to change the background and lighting every other minute, which is quite different from any other shoot I’ve ever done. As soon as Georgia looked amazing in Viktor & Rolf, then people would start drawing on SHOWstudio, which then gets projected automatically onto Georgia, the Viktor & Rolf, and onto the background.
This was essentially an experiment allowing the public and artist to showcase their work. I like the feeling of not being in control, and I think there’s something quite exciting creatively about relinquishing control. It’s something that creative people often find exhilarating, but quite terrifying because it’s very hard to know how you’re going to take a great photograph, let alone when somebody else is controlling the lighting and controlling the color of what you’re looking at.

What Nick Knight speaks of is exactly the original source of AOC’s own confusion and determination to understand exactly what was happening with Georgia Palmer’s skin color — but also cheekbones. Once we understood the process, I was no longer cursing under my breath about competitive models’ agents not including the entire model cast.

The entire experience became a creative learning adventure for me — which nearly always happens with Nick Knight. So thanks to everyone who made this project happen, and hopefully my journey into understanding it is relevant to the AOC audience, which we clearly share with V Magazine.

For the third time, I will make it easy for you to read the entire creative process. Google will penalize me for diluting the one link with three to the same source in one post. But who cares about SEO in the face of such a creative masterpiece, born outside of creative control on one of the most talented teams on the planet. There’s also creative process video of this story on Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio website. ~ Anne