Ethan James Green got the call that he had been chosen to shoot the Pirelli calendar on his 34th birthday. ‘It was an unexpected gift,’ he says, speaking at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in London’s Knightsbridge on the eve of its launch. Legendary Vogue fashion editor Tonne Goodman, who styled the project, is sat to his left. ‘It’s just such a huge thing to be asked. Becoming a Pirelli photographer, you're included in a club.’
First launched by the tyre manufacturer in 1964 as a giveaway to clients, early editions of the calendar pushed a louche kind of sexiness, often gathering sunny shots of models wearing next to nothing. Evolving to become a different beast entirely, it’s now synonymous with the apex of glamour and celebrity, representing a space for the most important fashion image-makers of each generation to make their mark. The club that Green speaks of includes Sarah Moon, who brought her ethereal eye to it’s pages in the 1970s; Richard Avedon, his iconic crisp studio-shot portraiture in the 1990s; Mert and Marcus, their pop provocation in the 2000s; and Tim Walker, his fantastical world-building in the 2010s. ‘So many of the past photographers have been huge inspirations for me,’ Green adds. ‘Many of them made me want to be a photographer.’
Following in the footsteps of these masters would be an intimidating prospect for any image-maker, but Green’s steady approach was simply to keep true to himself. The Michigan-born ex-model made his start by photographing friends and members of New York’s queer community on the streets of eastern Manhattan, capturing them in frank black and white portraits that celebrated an essential kind of beauty (these images were published in his debut book Young New York in 2019). In the five years since, his piercingly timeless work has covered every leading fashion tome, from Vogue to i-D, and shaped innumerable campaigns for brands like Dior and Prada. Building upon his contemporary vision of identity, sex and style, Green’s Pirelli calendar both looks back to its tearaway beach days and forward to what sensuality means in 2024.
Captured in two different worlds, each of the 12 subjects were shot on the sandy shores of Miami’s Virginia Key Beach Park and in a traditional studio set-up, drawing upon the sharp beauty of Avedon’s calendar. The cast is, as ever with Pirelli, star-strewn, though Green was sure to include figures that have been part of his world since he began. Hunter Schafer, Padma Lakshmi, Vincent Cassel, Hoyeon, John Boyega, and American model Jenny Shimizu, who also featured in the 1997 Avedon Calendar, are among those featured. ‘We started with people that I had personal relationships with,’ he says. ‘They were the foundation. From there, we had a lot of asks out to celebrities. You obviously want to have a variety of people if you're going to talk about sexy.’
Ethan James Green’s 2025 Pirelli Calendar
Green’s subjects were invited to embody their own personal ideas of sensuality, and to expose as much skin as they felt comfortable. Resulting in a spectrum of sultry moods, from the explosive movements of Cassel to the assured poise of Schafer, the process was completely collaborative. ‘We didn't tell anybody, “Oh, we're thinking of a fully nude picture of you”,’ Green explains. ‘We allowed each subject to really kind of guide us through the styling process.’
For Goodman, styling something so close to naked was a welcome challenge. ‘Very early on, Ethan said: “I don't want fashion to be part of it at all”. ‘I just thought, “OK, but I have to have something that they can relate to, that they feel sensuous in, that they can let it slip off their shoulder, or they can let it blow away, or they can let it get wet, but that does not really smack of fashion at all. It just smacks of something beautiful that becomes part of them and part of their body”.’
In an unusual twist, Green himself features in the calendar, appearing stark naked as the month of November. ‘We had multiple women fully nude, and we needed at least one guy to do it,’ he explains with a wry smile when asked why he chose to include a self-portrait. ‘The only person I could tell to do that was myself.’ Stepping on the other side of the camera not only levelled Green with his subjects as they bared all, but also sparked an interest in taking up modelling once more. He signed with IMG a few weeks ago. ‘I'd never done something so frontal-facing,’ the photographer says of the liberating experience of being in his calendar. ‘I'm in this moment where I'm just going to try and embrace and go with the flow. Let's see what happens.’
