Acne Studios Fall 2026 Ad Campaign

Denim Diaries

Review of Acne Studios Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Photographer Nan Goldin with models Ellie Rowsell, Guinevere Van Seenus, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Jordan Hemingway, Juliette Lewis, Peter Schlesinger, Raya Martigny, Rila Fukushima, and Sandra Poulson

Acne Studios returns to its roots for Fall 2026, marking three decades of denim with a campaign photographed by Nan Goldin. Creative director Jonny Johansson and stylist Robbie Spencer bring together a characteristically eclectic cast including Ellie Rowsell, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Guinevere van Seenus, Juliette Lewis, Rila Fukushima, Raya Martigny, Jordan Hemingway, and others. Mixing current pieces, archival designs, and re-editions, the campaign treats the brand’s 30th anniversary not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a portrait of denim as something that becomes more personal with time.

Goldin is an inspired choice for that premise. Denim is perhaps fashion’s most democratic record keeper: it fades, creases, tears, and molds itself to the person wearing it. Goldin’s photography has long operated according to a similar logic, finding meaning in accumulated experience rather than polished perfection. Here, her subjects inhabit richly textured interiors where peeling wallpaper, velvet upholstery, patterned walls, and uneven pools of warm light make the images feel discovered rather than constructed. Rowsell sprawls across a deep red sofa in glossy, worn-looking jeans; Lewis poses with a small dog against a distressed wall; Lyndon Chase reclines in layers of faded blue. The clothes look less styled onto them than absorbed into their respective worlds.

That sense of individuality is crucial to the campaign’s success. Rather than imposing a singular Acne Studios archetype on its cast, Goldin lets each sitter retain their own presence, creating something closer to an extended family album. The casting spans generations, disciplines, genders, and relationships to fashion, reinforcing denim as a material capable of moving easily between identities. Even the campaign’s straightforward graphic treatment – each subject’s name, Acne Studios, and “by Nan Goldin” beneath the photograph – gives the portraits the feeling of individual entries in a larger archive.

There is also a productive tension between Goldin’s visual language and the machinery of a luxury campaign. Her signature intimacy is inevitably more controlled here than in the autobiographical photographs for which she is best known, and the prominent branding makes that commercial framework impossible to forget. Yet the friction works in Acne’s favor. The house has always found its identity somewhere between Scandinavian pragmatism and deliberate weirdness, and Goldin’s slightly bruised interiors provide a convincing counterweight to the increasingly polished world surrounding luxury denim. The photographs feel expensive without becoming pristine.

Most importantly, the anniversary avoids embalming Acne Studios’ beginnings. The original 100 pairs of raw denim that Johansson and his collaborators gave to friends and creatives in 1996 already contained the blueprint for this campaign: make something, hand it to interesting people, and see what they do with it. Thirty years later, Goldin brings that idea full circle. Denim may be the canvas, but the wearers are still doing the painting.