Acclaimed photographer and activist Nan Goldin shot an ad campaign for Acne Studios to mark the Swedish fashion brand’s 30th anniversary.
For the campaign, Goldin photographed “the people in [Acne’s] creative family,” according to the brand. The people in her pictures were “chosen to capture Acne Studios’ founding spirit: one of free expression, creative experimentation and proud individuality,” a nod to the company’s former acronym which stood for “Ambition to Create Novel Expressions,” per a press release.
“I have been inspired by Nan and her work for years,” Acne cofounder and creative director Jonny Johansson 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.”
Goldin’s sitters include artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Peter Schlesinger, and Sandra Poulson, as well as actor and musician Juliette Lewis, musician Ellie Rowsell, model and photographer Guinevere Van Seenus, photographer Jordan Hemingway, actor and model Raya Martigny, and actor Rila Fukushima. The release also teased one more image of “another friend whose portrait will be revealed at a later date.”
“The subjects are people from our universe – individuals we have collaborated with, spoken to, or had some kind of exchange with over the years. I wanted friends, not models,” Johansson said.
Sandra Poulson poses for Nan Goldin as part of the 30th anniversary campaign of Acne Studios.
©Nan Goldin/Courtesy the artist and Acne Studios
They have been photographed wearing denim, which Acne described as “the brand’s foundational material.” When Acne was founded in 1996, Johansson and his cofounders gifted 100 pairs of raw denim jeans (with red stitching on the seams) to their circle of artists and creatives.
Of the fabric choice, Johansson said, “Denim is the perfect canvas. We’re rooted in it. It’s a material of today that also ages and becomes something else through its story. Denim personalises itself through wear – it becomes yours.”
“Denim is part of my everyday wear inside the studio, or out for dinner,” said Chase, who created the runway set for the house’s Spring/Summer 2025 show at Paris Fashion Week. “I love its multifaceted materiality.”
Peter Schlesinger poses for Nan Goldin as part of the 30th anniversary campaign of Acne Studios.
©Nan Goldin/Courtesy the artist and Acne Studios
Goldin has long partnered with a range of fashion brands, including RVCA (in 2010), Rodarte (2012), Medea (2018), Supreme (2018), and Gucci (2024). The Gucci collaboration involved Goldin photographing an ad campaign that featured musicians Debbie Harry and Kelsey Lu. She subsequently showed those six photographs at Gagosian; each image had an edition of seven with prices starting at $28,000 for a print.
Goldin is equally known for her images, most notably The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), and her activism. She founded the advocacy group P.A.I.N. in 2017 as a way to fight the opioid crisis, which she personally survived, and to call attention to how the Sackler family made money from it. She and her group staged various protests in museums to call attention to how the Sacklers had “washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world,” as she wrote in Artforum.
She also has become one of the most vocal art world supporters of Palestine, memorably giving a speech at the opening of her exhibition at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in 2024 in which she labeled Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. She gave a similar talk in Arles, France, in 2025. Last fall, she told Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil that “my career tanked—my market tanked from one day to the next because of my support of Palestine.”
