Nan Goldin has never been interested in making people look perfect. For decades, her camera has stayed close to friends, lovers, artists and collaborators, recording moments that feel lived-in rather than staged. Now, to mark Acne Studios’ 30th anniversary, that unmistakable eye turns toward fashion.

The Swedish house invited Goldin to photograph the people who move through its creative world: artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Sandra Poulson and Peter Schlesinger; actor Rila Fukushima; models Raya Martigny and Guinevere Van Seenus; musician Ellie Rowsell; and photographer Jordan Hemingway. All of them have worked with the brand before. Chase designed the set for its Spring/Summer 2025 Paris show, and Poulson’s sculptures have appeared in its stores.

Acne Studios has spent three decades working at the crossroads of fashion, art, music and culture. Founded in Stockholm in 1996 with 100 pairs of raw denim jeans with red stitching along the seams, it has grown into an international label whose identity is shaped as much by its cultural relationships as by its clothes.

Goldin’s landmark 1986 book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, turned the private lives of her circle into a raw visual diary. She photographed people as they were: vulnerable, glamorous, joyful and complicated. That intimacy brings a different energy to the polished conventions of fashion imagery.

Here, the clothes are present but never dominant. Denim from the Acne Studios archive sits alongside current pieces and re-editions, linking the label’s origins to its present. Each garment becomes part of the portrait rather than its purpose.

Among the sitters is Peter Schlesinger, the artist and photographer immortalised in David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). His presence draws an unexpected line between Hockney’s painted portraiture, Goldin’s diaristic photography and Acne Studios’ contemporary cultural landscape.

The anniversary reached the runway on 30 September 2026. Creative director Jonny Johansson showed his Spring/Summer 2027 womenswear collection at Paris’ Collège des Bernardins, with a 30th-anniversary dinner and party afterwards. The venue’s foundations date to the 13th century, and its vaulted ceilings made a dramatic backdrop.

Thirty years on, the brand’s story reads less as a history of collections than as a history of encounters, with artists, musicians, actors, models and friends passing through its orbit.