The #54 most Beautiful Woman

Nick Knight shot an editorial called Beautiful Women for British Vogue in which he portrayed the most beautiful women in the buzz bussiness. Among them there were Audrey Marnay, Penelope Tree, Twiggy, Kate and Claudia; Jerry Hall, Anjelica Houston ... Kate Moss was the woman number 54. The video on top ^^ is the recording Nick did of Kate, and even if nothing really happens during this shooting, still, the model looks so gorgeous.

The video was up in showstudio.com together with an interview to Nick Knight by Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum in London.

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So, you're Nick Knight. You're in a New York photographic studio to which a couple of dozen of the most famous models of the last fifty years have been summoned to be shot by you for British Vogue. There's Gisele, Audrey Marnay and Maggie Rizer; Penelope Tree, Twiggy and Patti Boyd; Naomi, Kate and Claudia; Jerry Hall, Marie Helvin and Patti Hansen; Dorian Leigh Parker, Carmen and Victoire Doutreleau; Anjelica Houston, Charlotte Rampling and Marisa Berenson; and on and on. They've been prepped by the stylists and they've posed for their portraits but, before they leave, what else would you ask them to do?

Don't forget, you're Nick Knight, so you'll ask them all to do two things. One is to kiss a piece of glass. (Now, we're not even going to try to go into why right now, but it's something that Knight has been asking models to do at the end of his sessions for years. And, in case, you're wondering, the glass goes straight into his archive afterwards.) Then you'll ask them to stand in front of a video camera, say their name and stay there for two minutes as the stars of a sort of John'n'Yoko-meet-Warhol home video that anyone who wants to can now see on SHOWstudio.

AR: Why?
NK: Because, once I realised that I could get access to these people - the great models of the 20th century - I thought, well, this is a unique opportunity and we should get as much out of them as we can. Some of the great models have already gone - Dovima, Lisa Fonssagrives Penn, the Beaton ones, the Steichen ones, a whole bunch of them - and a lot of the women in the Vogue shoot are in their sixties or older. So, I knew that I wouldn't be able to do a project like this again.

AR: How did you approach the Vogue shoot?
NK: Originally, I wanted to photograph them all in the nude, but that idea went out of the window very quickly. It's hard enough to persuade people to come out of retirement in Santa Barbara, without telling them that they're going to be photographed naked in their sixties. I was interested in trying to find out whether there was some sort of body shape that could be discerned from the sort of woman people want to photograph: whether there was a distinctive physiology or a discernible, almost coherent range of body shapes? And then I thought: "Well, if they're not going to want to do it, let's look at their faces and see if there's anything there." But we ended up shooting them full-length.

[...] >> read the whole interview here