Nan Goldin reshaped intimacy and realism, influencing fashion photography from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to her exhibition in Milan
Walking through the exhibits at Pirelli HangarBicocca for Nan Goldin’s This Will Not End Well, I felt a sense of unease and discomfort, alongside a powerful confidence in self-expression, identity and style.
The exhibition brings into focus Goldin’s unvarnished portraits of friends and lovers, relationships and lived experience, and prompts me to reflect on how her visual language continues to shape the aesthetics and ethics of contemporary fashion imagery.
Nan Goldin Exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca: Context and Cultural Significance
To give some context, This Will Not End Well, on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan until 15 February 2026, is the first major retrospective dedicated to Nan Goldin’s work as a filmmaker.
The exhibition brings together the largest corpus of slideshows ever presented, alongside a newly commissioned sound installation by Soundwalk Collective, conceived in close collaboration with the artist and functioning as a prelude to the exhibition.
At its core, the show reclaims Goldin’s slideshow practice as the heart of her artistic language: a form means of storytelling that is fluid, re-edited over time and deeply tied to sound, memory and lived experience.
The retrospective unfolds across a series of architectural structures conceived as pavilions by architect Hala Wardé, who has long collaborated with Goldin. Together, these pavilions form a symbolic village, each one responding to a specific work and amplifying its emotional and spatial intensity.
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Despite its ominous title, This Will Not End Well carries a benevolent irony, expressing Goldin’s defiant attachment to life, even in the face of trauma and loss.
The exhibition spans over four decades of Nan Goldin’s practice, from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), her seminal and ever-evolving masterpiece, to Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), a harrowing meditation on family trauma. It also includes Fire Leap (2010–2022), which turns to the fragile world of childhood.
At HangarBicocca, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls is presented inside the monumental Cubo, whose soaring height echoes the architecture of La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière in Paris, where the work was originally commissioned and shown in 2004, and is reinstated here in a form faithful to the original, including its sculptural elements.
In the Navate, the exhibition expands further with two additional slideshows presented for the first time in a museum context in Europe: You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024), Goldin’s first abstract work, inspired by an ancient myth in which animals steal the sun during an eclipse, and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), a visually layered dialogue between six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, portraits of Goldin’s friends, and images of paintings and sculptures drawn from museums around the world.
Together, these works reinforce Goldin’s vision of the slideshow as a medium that evolves with time, memory and personal history, and resists any fixed or definitive form.
Nan Goldin’s Style: Confidence, Trauma and Identity
Encountering the images prompted me to consider how Nan Goldin brought style and taste to times marked by chaos, trauma and disturbance. This is not merely a matter of visuals, but of confidence as a force capable of masking, or even dissolving, the suffering that underpins them.
Fashion operates in much the same way: what appears as dazzling flamboyance is often the result of intense labour and pain, akin to an artist transforming hardship into art.
Fashion is often accused of being superficial, a layered business of only clothes, make-up and a heady, multilayered performance of surface and disguise. However, it is also about confidence, perception and hard work.
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How Nan Goldin Changed Fashion Photography
Photographer Lou Stoppard calls fashion photography a festival of deception, making it ironic that Goldin described it as truthful and as a documentation of intimacy, thus becoming an icon even within the fashion photography industry. And this is the point: how Nan Goldin, through her confidence in it all, changed the fashion scene.
She emerged as a fashion fan in the 1970s, and through her Ballad series of the 1980s—crackling with drag queens, couples and heartbreaks that felt like a breath of raw air—she shattered the polished façade of glossy imagery.
Her style—flash-lit, candid and emotionally frank—reshaped fashion photography with her landmark The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, setting a template for a grittier aesthetic that hastened the 1990s fashion boom.
It was about liberation in her own unapologetic grunge realism. Campaigns would cast waifish models in trashed hotel rooms and beds, influencing the raw, real, authentic image with street-cast subjects and zero retouching, giving it a fashion documentary feel.
In a way, Goldin gave the fashion industry the unscripted, everyday, unfiltered, cyclical nostalgia and authenticity that the industry still portrays.
Nan Goldin’s Influence on Fashion Brands and Visual Culture
Nan Goldin’s themes of intimacy and marginality seep into real-life fashion narratives, with designers and photographers pushing for representation outside the narrow bracket of beauty.
Supreme built an entire capsule around Goldin’s photographs in their SS18 Artist Series.
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Gucci’s 2024 We Will Always Have London campaign saw former creative director Sabato De Sarno enlist Goldin herself to shoot Debbie Harry in a London cab, completing it with a Blondie bag; clearly an homage to Goldin’s own 1991 Taxi photograph.
Alexander McQueen had her shoot images of London nightlife, capturing fleeting moments during nights out. Even Bottega Veneta’s Spring 2010 campaign was inspired by her vérité style.
Nan Goldin’s Legacy in Contemporary Fashion Imagery
Goldin inspired fashion and changed how clothes and accessories were presented, with runway shows and campaigns still channelling her defiant spirit.
It is difficult to think of today’s fashion and advertising photography without reflecting on the groundbreaking visual paradigms Goldin introduced.
Even four decades after Ballad, Nan Goldin inspired fashion to be truthful and authentic, celebrating all beautiful people, high or low. She erased the boundaries between fashion and life, inspiring the industry today, which is, thanks to her, more inclusive, raw and spirited.
Anvi Sharma
Fashion Writer and Stylist, IM alumna of the Master in Fashion Promotion, Communication & Digital Media, Milano