Essay: Sporting Glamour With Pin Up Art

Depending on who you’re talking to, many fashion photographers the world over have multifarious ways of getting their pre-shoot inspiration dose. Sometimes it’s a cut-and-paste DIY-style mood board, inclusive of ideas, materials, aesthetics and props of various assorts connected in style and taste. Other times, it’s an array of individual images, devoid of any relation other than how they each correspond to the theme. Or sometimes, as in Nick Knight’s instance, it’s neither. ‘The original reference was in line with us wanting to picture glamour in the gym - “What could that be?”, we thought. And so we started with a reportage image of Marilyn Monroe in a gym doing weights, just in jeans and a t-shirt', Knight tells me. No fancy mood boards, no contradictory aesthetics; a single image will suffice for the world’s leading fashion photographer.

The image in question couldn’t have been more fitting for Knight, who is referring to his recent magazine cover shoot for Carine Roitfeld’s debut Players magazine - a biannual publication by Roitfeld's media company CR Fashion Book that immerses itself in sport as much as fashion. A marriage of two industries that, although have coalesced thanks to a sea of editorials for some time (many of which you would find Knight to be behind the lens and Roitfeld the go-to stylist) few have propelled the narrative to such extent it takes up an entire publication. We may have Circle Zero Eight but Players takes to sporting fashion quite literally, from which Roitfeld's venerable career has doubled-up as the springboard for.

Everyone is aware of fashion's more recent alignment with sport, less so do we know why. It was 2004 when the summer Olympics were held in Athens. Mark Zuckerberg had just co-founded Facebook and 'athleisure' - the term we use to refer to a hybrid style of clothing enmeshing athletic with casual, everyday wear as we know it now - was yet to be born, let alone thrown about as fashion's order of the day. As we know, time changes everything, fashion included and so the industry was changed forevermore post Roitfeld breaking history by putting Kate Moss in a Nike sports bra on the cover of the 2004 November issue of Vogue Paris, of which she was the title's editor-in-chief. It's a story which Roitfeld had in mind when launching Players. Continuing the precedent, CR Fashion Book's issue two anchored its roots in the realm of sport even more so by placing Roitfeld's own love affair with ballet front and centre; a sport she had been practicing for a year and a half prior. Twenty-one years later, the connection reverberates still thanks to Roitfeld's nerve and fervour for making the undesirable not just the contrary, but ostensibly sexy.

Knight’s sport-led editorials are also the stuff of fashion lore. First, you have the image-maker's transgressive photograph of Paralympian and McQueen muse Aimee Mullins, which graced the cover of Dazed’s September 1998 issue, guest edited by none other than the late great designer himself. Then there's also the V Magazine editorial-cum-SHOWstudio project Get Back, Stay Back, of course styled by Roitfeld and also featuring supermodel Lara Stone, (the model that has simultaneously reunited the fashion-favourite pair for Players). More than just an editorial, Get Back, Stay Back played on Knight's own interest in self-defence, particularly for those equally invested in fashion and so saw Stone cladded in a selection of Spring/Summer 2012's finest fashions while demonstrating the techniques of Krav Maga, which originated in Czechoslovakia during the late 1930s and 1940s.

‘I had young children who were approaching adolescence at the time and kept thinking of how all these self defence classes teaching you the basics of “what to do if you get attacked” don’t take fashion into consideration. The truth is, you’re most likely to be dressed in your going out clothes, heels and a mini dress or whatever your choice of clothing is when you’re attacked because you’re coming home from a night out. We need to know how to perform these moves dressed up as well as down,’ Knight told the audience at the SHOWstudio x Selfridges Obsessions: Fashion Film event last month.

With all that said and done, you would be right to assume Knight (and Roitfeld, for that matter) are both well-versed in the art of sport as well as fashion, but what about Marilyn? Hollywood’s favourite blonde wasn’t necessarily heralded as a champion for sports, but she is the original pin-up, or at least, one of them - an era that captured both Knight and Roitfeld's attention ahead of their Players cover. ‘Marilyn Monroe symbolises that era of pinup very specifically, and one of the main components of that look was an illustrator called Alberto Vargas. He would draw and colour these very stylised beautifully glam women which was picked up on by Roxy Music in the 1970s’ Knight expressed. ‘A lot of Vargas girls appeared on those early Roxy Music album covers or at least inspired them. It's also the same period where women were wearing conical bras’ (an appearance you can glean from the undergarment’s given name). ‘So there was a very particular 1940s look happening within Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry’s image was very much based on that American 1940s look. A time when pinup girls were painted on the sides of aeroplanes... that's a small part of where the shoot is grounded'.

To bring such a vision to life, there is no more obvious a choice than Stone, a firm favourite of Roitfeld certified by the countless number of CR Fashion Book covers the supermodel has landed on, the issue's first in 2012 included. Unlike Monroe lifting weights in the gym, Stone isn't poised on her back - instead inattentively dangling from two gymnast hoops set a metre apart where she rests her elbows. Just like Monroe, Stone's hair and make-up, courtesy of SHOWstudio friends Eugene Souleiman and Val Garland, is ever-reminiscent of Vargas' pin-up girls, the ones favoured by Ferry and the ones that have dictated and shaped our collective vision of the pin-up since. Adding to the editorial's gilded glitz and glamour is a gold zipped up adidas tracksuit top. Say no more, this is 1955 redone in 2025. The industry's best re-seen through the lens of fashion's most revered creatives.