Cult Skating Label Supreme Collaborates with Photographer Nan Goldin for Latest Collection

Skate label and fashion brand Supreme are collaborating with photographer Nan Goldin for their latest artist series. New t-shirts, hoodies and skateboard decks released on 29 March will feature photography from Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first published in 1986 – a record of her life and friends after she left home at 14 to join a commune, documenting downtown New York caught in the grip of the AIDS crisis.

Supreme said that the iconic photographer’s work ‘comes from an era where the subjects she documented were taboo by society’s standards. To do this project with Nan Goldin is to celebrate the diversity her work represents and expose young people to it.’

Supreme is well known for collaborations throughout its 24 year history, a fact Bjarne Melgaarde teasingly pointed to in his 2017 fashion line Suprem(e) – an imagined collaboration between Supreme and critical theory publisher Semiotex(e) with varsity jackets emblazoned with ‘Kathy Acker’ and ‘Tiqqun editions’, or the title of Chris Kraus’s art world novella I Love Dick (1997) in Supreme's Futura font. Barbara Kruger has also engaged in a long standing feud with the label for their appropriation of her text-based work.

Goldin has been making headlines recently with her campaign against descendants of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler – owners of the opioid-manufacturing Purdue Pharma – and cultural institutions which have accepted their philanthropy. Earlier this month Goldin led 100 protestors into the Met’s Sackler Wing, chanting ‘Sacklers Lie, People Die’, staging a ‘die-in’ in the gallery.

In a recent op-ed for frieze, writer Rafia Zakaria looks at what Goldin’s protesting of the Purdue Pharma-owning Sacklers’s complicity in the US opioid crisis tells us about arts patronage.