Nan Goldin Shoots Acne Studios' 30th Anniversary Campaign

Nan Goldin has photographed the 30th anniversary campaign for Acne Studios, the Stockholm-founded fashion house, turning her lens on a curation of friends in a series the brand describes as intimate portraits Artnews.

The campaign pulls Goldin into the heart of Acne Studios' milestone celebrations, which also include a new denim campaign she shot featuring actors and artists including Juliette Lewis, a fresh fragrance created with perfumer Suzy Le Helley called 'Acne Studios par Frédéric Malle,' and the latest edition of Acne Paper — the brand's publishing arm — marking three decades of the label's creative world The New York Times. Acne Studios also operates a gallery space in Paris, the Acne Paper Palais Royal, and presented its Fall/Winter 2026 collection at the Collège des Bernardins.

For Goldin, the collaboration lands during a particularly visible stretch. The Grand Palais in Paris presented 'Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well' — the first retrospective in France devoted to her video work. Gagosian Paris showed her exhibition 'Blue Hills, Italy' from 17 March to 15 May 2026. And in March 2025, Kering — the luxury group behind Gucci and Saint Laurent — named her the winner of its Women in Motion Award for photography WWD.

Goldin has spent decades building the raw, flash-lit visual language she is known for. Her photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a diaristic record of her life and the people around her, has been in print since the 1980s and has influenced generations of photographers and filmmakers.

What makes the Acne Studios pairing feel natural rather than forced is that both Goldin and the brand trade in a similar kind of intimacy — the sense that you are looking at real people in unguarded moments, not models performing for a camera. Acne Studios, founded in 1996 in Stockholm by Jonny Johansson, has built its identity on that exact quality of understated closeness, from its runway casts of non-professional models to its editorial publications.

The anniversary campaign places Goldin's photographs at the centre of a brand celebration that spans clothing, fragrance, publishing and exhibition space — a fittingly wide stage for an artist who has always treated every aspect of visual culture as fair game for her camera.