Nick Knight working on the latest Tiffany & Co. collections for Lampoon Meccano

SHOWstudio, London – Nick Knight interprets Tiffany collections portraying Hunter Piferc and conceptually connecting body, structure, and surface – this Lampoon’s MECCANO issue

Nick Knight shoots Tiffany & Co. for Lampoon Meccano: SHOWstudio, London and the architecture of image-making

The building that houses ShowStudio in London has lived several lives before becoming one of the most influential image-making spaces in contemporary fashion. It was once a baptist church. Later, it became home to Ian Fleming — the man who invented James Bond, who understood better than almost anyone the power of a well-made object, a name, a surface that means more than it shows. That lineage isn’t incidental: the building’s current tenant, Nick Knight, operates with a similar understanding – that images are not illustrations, but arguments.

Nick Knight founded ShowStudio in 2000, at a moment when the internet was still mostly misunderstood by the fashion industry as a distribution problem rather than a creative opportunity. He saw it differently. ShowStudio launched as a platform for fashion film, live-streamed runway shows, and collaborative projects at a time when none of those things had a name yet. It was, in effect, a studio that broadcast itself — process made visible, not just product. Over two decades it has grown into an archive of fashion thinking: interviews, films, shoots, essays, all produced from the same building.

The space reflects Knight’s method: it performs coolness, yet it functions as a production environment that sustains a network of creatives. The studio is configured for still photography, moving image, and hybrid formats that operate across both without distinction. For Lampoon MECCANO, Nick Knight photographed and interpreted jewels from the Tiffany collections, treating them not as isolated objects but as elements within a system of body, surface, and image. On set, Nick Knight wants to work with the talented Hunter Pifer.

Nick Knight: fashion photography, SHOWstudio, and image construction since the 1980s

Born in 1958, Nick Knight studied photography at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art. His early work — most notably a 1982 series documenting skinheads — announced a photographer who was interested in subculture as form, not spectacle. He didn’t photograph outsiders. He photographed systems of self-presentation.

The career that followed placed him at the center of every shift in fashion image-making over four decades. He shot Yohji Yamamoto campaigns that redefined what fashion photography could refuse to do — refuse clarity, refuse flattery, refuse the conventional relationship between garment and body. He worked with Alexander McQueen across a collaboration that produced some of the most formally aggressive images in the industry’s history. He photographed Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Björk. He shot David Bowie — and with Bowie the connection ran deeper than a commission, because both men shared a belief that identity is a construction to be undertaken seriously, with craft and risk.

Knight has never been a documentarian. His images are built, not found. He uses digital manipulation to push an image past what a camera alone can see — toward something truer than realism, which is a different thing from truth. The distinction matters when he turns his attention to jewelry, because jewelry already operates in that register. 

Tiffany HardWear, Knot and Elsa Peretti Cuff in Lampoon Meccano

For Lampoon MECCANO, Knight photographed jewels from three Tiffany’s collection styled on Hunter Pifer. Each one arrives with its own internal logic, its own set of references, its own argument about what jewelry is for.

Credits

Photography Nick Knight, styling Sadie Davies, executive producer @ShowStudio Charlotte Knight, creative consultant Calum Knight, executive producer Kat Davey @Liberte Productions, hair Eugene Souleiman @Streeters, wardrobe manager Olivier Van De Velde, makeup Chiao Li Tsu @Art & Commerce, manicurist Abeena Robinson @Agency 41, art director Michael Gossage, film Esme Warren, production design Andrew Tomlinson, photography assistants Lara Hughes, Gil Warner, Old Knight Kid, digital Gabriel Lloret, styling assistant Ada Matylda, production assistant Jonathan Faulkner, hair assistant Carlo Avena, retouch Epilogue Imaging LTD., talent Hunter Pifer @IMG Models