Although Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta (above) have become known for their original and inventive casting since founding their label, Eckhaus Latta, this time around they took things to another level.
Creating an exxxtremely NSFW Spring 2017 campaign, the duo took to finding alternative couples who were willing to be photographed while wearing their clothes and, well, having real sex.
To capture the moments, they brought photographer Heji Shin onboard, but, not surprisingly, casting the couples wasn’t the easiest task in the world, reports WMag:
“It had to be authentic,” Eckhaus said. “I don’t think the idea of simulation ever even crossed our mind.”
“When the Craigslist line was kind of like crickets, there were some jokes, like, [should it just be] Mike and Zoe?” Latta recalled with a laugh from Los Angeles, where she’s based (along with the brand’s new first-ever brick-and-mortar store), of finding models for their first-ever major campaign.
Still, it took another six months for the campaign to come together, due to the difficulties of finding models willing to take part. Eckhaus and Latta’s friend Sam Muglia, for one, proved an ideal casting director thanks to the variety of people he knows from “alternative cultural experiences”…
With Muglia’s help (Shin also enlisted a couple she’d worked with back in Berlin), the team assembled a cast of mostly thirty-somethings, all of whom Shin shot by herself in their bedrooms. “They had to be comfortable and intimate—they’re not professionals,” she said. “But they were all excited about it, and wanted to do it—and to do it in the context of the Eckhaus Latta ad campaigns. It was actually pretty real. Of course, sometimes you have to stage small things, like putting hair on another side. But, other things are very hard to stage—with guys, for example, you have to be quick.”
In the end, it all came together: After Eckhaus and Latta uploaded the campaign—pixelated, and tagging only the models who requested they did so—on Monday, their site quickly crashed. “The idea that we made people hungry for an image is fascinating to us,” Latta said. When the site went back online, the response was largely “super-positive,” which pleasantly surprised the designers. It seemed to confirm their intent—to normalize, not sensationalize.
And the result? A fully NSFW campaign:
Those squares of pixels don’t really help much, do they?
[source:thefourohfive&indy100&wmag]