Why Eckhaus Latta Chose to Show Real-Life Couples Having Sex in Their NSFW Spring Ads

Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta are two young designers known for their inclusive, emotionally charged runway shows and provocative (yet increasingly retail-friendly) designs. Their Spring 2017 campaign, which hit the interwebs on Monday and promptly crashed the Eckhaus Latta site, is about as provocative — and inclusive — as it gets. The ads show real-life couples — some interracial, some straight, some gay — engaging in various sex acts whilst (kind of) wearing the brand’s cool, deconstructed spring offerings.

The couples, scouted with the help of Eckhaus and Latta’s friend Sam Muglia (after a series of hopeful Craiglist postings went largely unanswered) were shot in their own bedrooms by Korean-German photographer Heji Shin. The fashion photographer’s “very clean, beautiful, and emotionally photographed” work in a sex education textbook for teenagers placed her firmly on the design duo’s radar.

“For us, it was really important to think of sex as something really natural and not something fabricated, hyper-sexualized, or taboo,” Eckhaus told WThe series is a comment on the voyeurism and consumerism of the fashion industry. “We were thinking of how we were using sexuality, the relationship between fashion advertising and sexuality — and in a very direct terms saying sex sells,” explained Shin.

The result is a “sex-positive, body-positive, sexuality-positive” campaign that, while most definitely NSFW, is intimate, objectively beautiful and eschews the label of “porn” (thanks in part to the pixilation that blurs the models’ genitalia). The clothes do come off as a somewhat of an afterthought, but honestly, we’ve been sold on Eckhaus Latta’s Spring 2017 collection since it hit the runway last September.

See the full campaign here.

[ via W ]


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