Marking its 40th anniversary, Marc Jacobs brought together a cast of friends and collaborators for its Spring/Summer 2024 campaign, shot by German photographer Jeurgen Teller. Among the subjects captured were artist and photographer Cindy Sherman and musicians FKA Twigs, Lil Uzi Vert and Bladee.
In the series of lo-fi shots, Teller posed each subject solo on the street in front of Marc Jacobs’ lower Manhattan headquarters.
For Sherman’s, which circulated online Wednesday, the septuagenarian artist donned two personas that have appeared in her own work before: one is in full grunge with long faux-brunette hair and legs spread apart, seated on the side of the street. In the other, Sherman is blonde, with gloved hands, standing outside of the brand’s 72 Spring Street entrance, as she balances in platform heels half-a-foot off the ground.
The collaboration between the American designer and photographers Teller and Sherman dates back almost two decades. In 2005, the three published Ohne Titel, a collection of then-unpublished images that Teller had taken with him and Sherman as the main subjects, dressed eerily like a set of twins. The project derived from Jacobs’s idea to tap the two for an ad campaign. By that time, he’d already been working with Teller since 1997. In 2008, art dealer Barbara Gladstone told the New York Times of the project: “The ads are really for people who get it, and I think Marc and Juergen happily dispense with those who don’t.”
Sherman’s feature in the latest campaign coincides with two other major shows of her work on view in the U.S. and Europe.
In New York earlier this month, she unveiled a new series at Hauser & Wirth, a group of 30 images in which she manipulates her own portraits by adding in prosthetic features and making digital alterations.
The other titled, “Anti-Fashion,” ongoing until early March at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, surveys Sherman’s ties to fashion. The personas she constructs in her photographs have long responded to the industry’s contorted expectations, a curator argued in a catalogue entry accompanying the exhibition, adding that Sherman’s characters “are anything but desirable, and run counter to the fashion world ideals of flawlessness.”