Acne Studios has tapped Nan Goldin to shoot its 30th-anniversary campaign, and the pairing makes more sense the longer you sit with it. The Swedish label built its name on denim, and Goldin has spent five decades doing something not entirely dissimilar — turning close attention to the people around her into a body of work. For this campaign, she photographed nine friends of the house, all dressed in a mix of new, archival, and reissued denim pieces spanning Acne’s three decades: artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Sandra Poulson, and Peter Schlesinger; actors Rila Fukushima and Juliette Lewis; models Raya Martigny and Guinevere Van Seenus; musician Ellie Rowsell; and photographer Jordan Hemingway. A tenth portrait, of a sitter not yet named, is set to follow later.
Every person Goldin photographed already has ties to the brand — Chase designed the runway set for Acne’s Spring/Summer 2025 show in Paris, and Poulson’s sculptures have shown up in the label’s stores before. That continuity was the point, according to co-founder and creative director Jonny Johansson. “I have been inspired by Nan and her work for years,” he said in a statement. “So, when we realized we had 30 years to celebrate, it felt like the right moment to ask her. I wanted an icon, but I also wanted something very intimate and personal. She does that.” The cast, he added, are “individuals we have collaborated with, spoken to, or had some kind of exchange with over the years. I wanted friends, not models.”
It’s a fitting commission for Goldin, whose career has been built on photographing her own chosen family of friends and lovers — most famously in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985). Beyond the camera, she’s also known for founding P.A.I.N. in 2017, the activist group whose museum protests pushed institutions around the world to remove the Sackler name over the family’s role in the opioid crisis, a campaign chronicled in Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. This isn’t her first foray into fashion either — she shot a Gucci campaign in 2024 featuring Debbie Harry and Kelsey Lu.