Nick Knight’s Metaverse dream comes with NFT Project Ikon-1 – WWD

Nick Knight, the photographer, filmmaker and founder of groundbreaking fashion website ShowStudio, has finally dipped his toes into the metaverse with the launch of the icon-1 NFT collection.

After teasing his collaboration with model and Instagram star Jazzelle Zanaughtti, better known by her social media moniker Uglyworldwide, in an interview with WWD earlier this summer, around 8,000 unique collectibles, built to fit the ERC-721 standard to make not -fungible tokens, will be released in early December on ikon-1.com.

Once minted, each icon-1 token will have its own home page with expanded views of the NFTs, and the page will act as a ticket to access the virtual ShowStudio and Knight’s future projects and drops.

The first project after the launch of ikon-1 will be a virtual live fashion shoot that will be open only to NFT holders.

“Zanaughtti will be wearing some of the NFTs and if you are lucky enough to have one of these I will photograph and make pictures of your NFTs,” he added.

Knight discovered Zanaughtti six years ago through Instagram. He considers them “a modern version of Cindy Sherman, creating all these exciting and different looks for herself.”

“I remember them shaving off their eyebrows. And at the time they were with a local modeling agency in Chicago, who said, ‘Oh, you’ve shaved your eyebrows. You will never work again. You are now fired from his agency. And Zanaughtti’s response was to shave off his hair completely and move to New York,” Knight recalled.

Impressed by Zanaughtti’s bold look, Knight invited them to work on a Comme des Garçons shoot. “The clothes are fantastic. You need someone who had that sense of otherworldliness that Rei Kawakubo puts into design,” Knight added.

These Icon 1 artworks are the result of more than 40 collaborations handpicked by Knight and Zanaughtti. Some of them specialize in digital fashion creation, such as Tribute Brand, Scarlett Yang, Linxi Zhu and Nusi Quero.

The photographer believes that having these cutting-edge digital fashion designers on board is like having “Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons and John Galliano create a wardrobe for you”.

He learned the hard way that you also have to dress to impress in the metaverse.

“I went to a virtual opening of the brilliant Russian doll makers, the two sisters who made these incredible dolls. They created a virtual room, which was actually incredibly impressive, and I went to visit them in that room. But, of course, because I have a physical appearance in the metaverse, which I did not control at all, [and] these two sisters come towards me, both dressed in Chanel – one in pink and one in baby blue – and I looked down at myself.

“I had gotten the standard Oculus Rift kind of clothing, which I’m not going to tell you what it was, but it wasn’t good. That was not how I wanted to appear in front of these two artists that I had enormous respect for, Knight said.

Famous hairdresser Eugene Souleiman and nail artist Marian Newman were also involved. They made 50 sets of hairpieces and 15 sets of nails respectively for the project.

After all the digital assets were created, it was the responsibility of longtime ShowStudio collaborator digital artist Tom Wandrag to put the 3D models together and swap all the different digital elements around to create these unique tokens for icon-1 .

“When we started doing the combinations, it quickly became hundreds of thousands. So we took it all the way down to 8,000. But what’s really interesting is the fact that even though it’s the same avatar in the same pose, the range of images we’ve managed to create very varied, very different and very exciting.

“There is another component to this. I worked on about 500 of these in the collection, where I actually got to work with a program called ZBrush, where you can completely change someone’s physical properties. Even that physicality no longer becomes human, you are looking at something [that] is like an abstract painting. It’s suddenly not far from a Pierre Soulages painting,” explained Knight.

Knight is no stranger to digital fashion. One of his earliest projects at ShowStudio, the London-based creative platform he founded in 2000, was a 3D scan of a model on a virtual catwalk. He has also used similar techniques in projects with megastars such as Bjork and Lady Gaga, and fashion brands such as Burberry and Margiela.

He said that the idea to do an NFT project started at the beginning of the shutdown, when “it became impossible to continue in the same way that the fashion industry had been working for the last but many years.

“My goal is to make ShowStudio a virtual space where you can come and interact in a meaningful and entertaining way. And this project is the first step toward that,” Knight said.

“When you’re part of a big creative wave that’s happening, you can’t quite establish the parameters of that way. Of course, you can look back at Pop Art, Surrealism or Impressionism, and say there are these artists. They did this. It’s worth it.It changed this and it’s job.

“But when you’re part of something that’s moving forward, and reinventing itself as you go along, it’s very hard to see how far-reaching it is and what it will actually become. I hope a virtual ShowStudio will be a much more exciting place than other places I see at the moment, he added.

With the ikon-1 project, Knight said he wants to “set the standard for fashion in the metaverse,” claiming it’s the first time an image creator of his caliber has produced a full-fledged editorial project that fully utilizes blockchain and NFT technologies.

He believes that these NFTs can be considered “iconic mixed-media editorial artworks and access symbols to the burgeoning Web3 world that ShowStudio is building publicly via projects like this.”

“Fashion must change. And the digital world is the future of fashion, in my opinion. Traditionally, photographers view models as a blank canvas for their ideas; that’s not how we work here. I want Zanaughtti to be at the center of creating his own avatar,” Knight said.

“I do not impose a gaze on the Zanaughtti, but give them a new dimension to exist in; with all the splendor, with all the surrealism, with all the poetry and whimsy. We are making the first NFT with feelings, with feelings and with a point of view, he said.

Knight also believes that the decentralized nature of Web3 fits well with ShowStudio’s long tradition of “never accepting advertising because we never wanted people to tell us what we can and can’t do.”

“If this project makes money, that would be great. But that’s not the end of why we’re doing it. We’re doing it partly because I love making pictures, and I’m very fascinated by new technology.

“The metaverse is a fascinating new situation for all of us. It’s a new civilization. I think it’s very important for artists and people who work for the love of art to be involved in what ShowStudio has really always been about, making money, but “kind of making art and trying to do things that feel exciting. I think it’s important to go into the metaverse in that spirit,” Knight said.

Regarding upcoming projects after Ikon-1, Knight said he would love to bring tailoring into the metaverse.

“There are so many interesting things to do and what we’re going to do in this virtual space. But perhaps as surprising as it is, it’s an interesting concept to bring Savile Row tailoring into the metaverse where people don’t actually have physical bodies,” he said.