I took this in 2001 for an exhibition to celebrate John Galliano’s first five years at Dior. John wanted to showcase his couture collections: there were 10, and each one was to be represented by a single dress, and each dress by one girl. Erin O’Connor did this one. The show was to take place at the Design Museum in London but it never happened because of 9/11.
I like the cocktail of ideas. First, you have how Erin looks: she’s topless, she’s got pink plasters across her nipples, and she has a Clockwork Orange-style false nose on. She’s wearing the Marie Antoinette dress, which is embroidered with scenes from the French Revolution including her own beheading. The piano-smashing is a reference to Karlheinz Stockhausen, the experimental musician. He wrote a string quartet to be played in helicopters and I had this idea of a piano being pushed out of one of them.
Erin is fantastic: she looks like a 1950s couture model. She has this incredible six-foot-something frame, so when she poses she looks incredibly graphic and structural. She also has a very good understanding of what it takes to make an image, and loves all the drama and performance of a shoot. I just said: “OK, here’s a piano, here’s a sledgehammer, off you go.”
When making an image, you don’t say: “Let’s put a nose on her because that’ll symbolise this and this will mean that.” But you do do an awful lot of playing around and invention, in a spirit of freedom. There’s a real group psychology to it: we work in teams of four, five, six people, with hair and makeup and stylist and art director all participating. They all have exciting and different things to say – and that’s true of all the people I work with, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen, from Kanye West to Björk. These are people I’m excited by.
We are going through huge cultural changes at the moment, what with Brexit and things like that, which is causing a lot of fear. People always look to the past and make themselves small when they are scared. That’s why I like this image so much. To me, it represents freedom and an optimism about the future.
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Nick Knight: Image is at the Daelim Museum, Seoul, South Korea, until 26 March.
Nick Knight’s CV
Born: London, 1958
Training: Bournemouth and Poole College of Art.
Influences: “The complexity of life.”
High point: “Always the future.”
Low point: “Always the past.”
Top tip: “Never give up.”
