Shot over a decade, Nick Offord’s new book documents the unseen side of the fashion world and the friendships formed in the long intervals behind the scenes
From the runways to the red carpets and the afters, fashion week provides us with a deluge of images capturing otherworldly glamour. Even backstage shots, while less polished, still possess a kind of mystery and allure; the rails of clothes, the make-up and hair, the hurried costume changes, the frenetic pace.
No Shows, a new photo book by Nick Offord, offers us an alternative perspective of fashion week, no less compelling but much more still and languid. Working as a model for ten years, his pictures depict the long durations of waiting, lounging, killing time and messing about in a series of “shared hotel rooms, budget airlines, trains, bathrooms, waiting rooms”. It’s men’s fashion week from the dark side of the lens.
During recurring seasons in New York, London, Milan and Paris, Offord took his camera everywhere. “In my late teens and early twenties, I found myself dropped into the deep end of the fashion world,” he tells AnOther. “Feeling like an outsider on one hand, yet quickly meeting like-minded friends in the same position, I took to the camera as a way of taking creative control and dealing with the uncertainty of my position.”
For someone whose job was to exist primarily in the gaze of others, turning the camera back onto his surroundings and mediating his experience through the viewfinder provided Offord with subjectivity and a strategy to navigate his role. “I was always aware of this perspective we had; it felt like so many people were looking in on us, we just happened to be on the inside looking out,” he recalls. “A big part of taking to the camera in the first place was the fact I was struggling to find a place for myself ... [Taking photographs] gave me a self-initiated job which I took quite seriously after people started paying interest. I’ve been doing that ever since.”
With many signed to the pioneering modelling agency Tomorrow Is Another Day, Offord’s subjects are the androgynous, unconventional male beauties for which the era-defining agency became renowned. Among the pages of No Shows, you’ll encounter many rising catwalk stars during the early days of their ascent, including Jonas Glöer, Leon Dame, whose walk at Margiela is regarded as an iconic moment, and Sang Woo Kim, who subsequently became a celebrated painter – now all household names in their own right.
Away from the pageantry of the fashion world, No Shows offers us a different kind of beauty born from the long spells of enforced inactivity and the transitory spaces that the life of a model entails. Offord shows us the toll of the work – the bloodied feet, fatigue or boredom, inauspicious hotel rooms and gridlocked traffic – as well as the hysteria, the camaraderie and the laughter. “The friendships allowed me to take photos that no one else could,” he tells us. “The overarching theme of the book is friendship. There’s a real intimacy about the project. I’m really present in the photos as the photographer. If there’s a photo of someone brushing their teeth, you can guarantee I was there brushing mine too. I’ve always been drawn to that, photographers that become immersed in their subject.”
There’s a soulful quality to No Shows. Inspired by the likes of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, David Armstrong and Peter Hujar, Offord’s style of documentary photography is tender and unadorned. He describes his aesthetic as “raw, real, gritty”. “There’s a melancholy to the project,“ he explains. “I’m not too interested in taking sharp, perfect photos; what’s important is attitude. A photo with attitude can go a very long way.”
Of all the photographs featured in No Shows, one that feels particularly evocative for Offord is a portrait of his friend Adam lying in bed, gazing through the window. The sheets are in disarray and there’s detritus on the floor, but in the soft light of what might be dawn, there’s a sublime Renaissance-like quality to this tableau. “He might be terribly hungover, he looks distressed, but there’s also this serene beauty to the scene,” the photographer reflects. “It’s all chaotic, messy and disordered but so beautiful. And that’s how I always remember those times. I can’t quite believe that’s how I spent so much of my adolescence. It makes me feel very lucky to have experienced and shared it with so many good people.”
No Shows by Nick Offord is published by Road Map and is out now.
