Playing House With Nan Goldin

Australian fashion brand Scanlan & Theodore rarely does things by the book. For one thing, it doesn’t advertise. For another, though its international fans include Mischa Barton and Carine Roitfeld, you can only kit yourself out in its breezily glamorous designs by visiting one of its nine stores down under. The label’s creative director, Gary Theodore (who launched Scanlan & Theodore with Fiona Scanlan in 1987), has been described as Melbourne’s equivalent of Martin Margiela by the Australian press, because of his reluctance to be photographed or interviewed. And for his brand’s seasonal lookbooks, he has tended to collaborate with unusual and controversial artists, the latest of whom is Nan Goldin, a photographer whose images are famed for their visceral emotional impact, intimacy and unflinching honesty. “We’ve always sought out singular––sometimes riskily so––voices and visions to express the independent nature of our brand,” says Theodore, who in previous seasons has worked with photographers such as David Armstrong and Bill Henson. “This time we thought it should be Nan.” After contacting Goldin through a mutual friend, Theodore discovered that she had her own ideas, specifying Texan beauty Erin Wasson (who, besides being a muse to Alexander Wang, designs her own jewelry line Low Luv and has collaborated with skate and surf brand RVCA on several ready-to-wear collections) as her subject of choice. This all arranged, Goldin and Wasson met at a tumbledown mansion in Yonkers, outside New York, producing the above images, which we exclusively premiere today. The rough-smooth beauty of the shoot neatly offsets the collection, which, according to Theodore, “plays on contradiction with a feeling of warm and cool, both in the colors and the fabrics.” Read Erin Wasson’s thoughts on the whole experience in our exclusive interview.