“For a long time I did not like my name or where I came from,” Andreas Kronthaler explained in the show notes of his spring/summer 18 show in Paris, back in October. “I always wanted to be called Maximilian or Augustus. I wanted to come from somewhere like Rome.” It was a collection rooted in Kronthaler’s coming-of-age acceptance of who he is. So it’s fitting, really, that a new campaign from the brand featuring this collection, as well as other Vivienne Westwood ready-to-wear pieces and accessories, stars himself and a cast of beautiful, gender-binary-rejecting New York club kids, models and actors.
To celebrate the opening of the first Vivienne Westwood store in New York, Viv and Andreas hosted an exhibition with Juergen Teller, celebrating all the imagery they have shot together over the last two decades. The exhibition soon became a party, and the party soon became a campaign. Starring models Sarah Brown, Poster Boy, Pan Dulce, Chiki Uno, Dylan Jayne, Milk (star of the most series of RuPaul’s Drag Race), Richie Shazam (who appeared in i-D’s The Game-Changing Issue) and queen of cool Chloë Sevigny, alongside Viv and Andreas, the shots contain all the non-conformist spirit of VW, and kick-off their arrival to NYC nicely.
“They all looked so great! So we decided we wanted to shoot them all for the campaign. We wanted to shoot them in the exhibition space at the top of our store, it seemed natural,” says Andreas. “Of course, we wanted to shoot them in their city in their natural environment, in New York. We really loved Chloë for the campaign. I met her at our exhibition. She’s so lovely and looks really good in our clothes!”
Given all that’s happening the US right now, with a vocal opposition to an ultra-conservative president and party coming from young people, Andreas considered it the perfect backdrop for the campaign. “With everything that’s going on there politically, it feels charged, like there is a new energy. People seem to be really standing-up!”
