Yahoo Lifestyle Equinox Taps Charlotte Wales for Campaign and Kenny Scharf for L.A. Fires Relief Effort
Equinox has unveiled its new advertising campaign, and has cued up the artist Kenny Scharf for a project to help support relief efforts for victims of the L.A. wildfires.
The high-end health, fitness and wellness operation’s new campaign is a fresh take on its “Commit to Something” mantra that was debuted about a decade ago with a Steven Klein shoot. This time Equinox tapped British fashion photographer Charlotte Wales, whose portfolio includes work for Chanel, Hermès, Bottega Veneta, Chloé, Pop magazine and others. The Equinox images include one set in a living room, where a bare-chested, well-chiseled man in a pair of jeans is doing a one-handed side plank with one arm raised above, holding a baby upright. Reginald Van Nurden, executive creative director at Equinox, said of Wales, “She had that perfect tone. We were really going for this early mid-2000s Steven Meisel W magazine kind of feel to it. It’s really cheeky. It’s got tongue-in-cheek feel to it, but with a bit of swagger, which is distinctly Equinox.”
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The shoot was done in Barcelona to relay more of a universal look, according to Van Nurden, who joined Equinox nine months ago after working for Annex88, a social and cultural agency, where he specialized in fashion and music for accounts like Louis Vuitton.
Additional Wales-shot vignettes will coincide with different Equinox launches this year. One features a model standing beside an AI version of themselves. Each of the eight stories is tied to a different subculture and concept “to tell a deeper piece of the Equinox heritage,” Van Nurden said.
“There is one vignette that speaks to the rise of OnlyFans and content creators that is really cool and sexy,” he said.
Image is “incredibly important” to Equinox, Van Nurden said. “We exist in a crowded space, but we really stand out as ‘a category as one,’ as we like to say internally. Equinox has always had a DNA in fashion and culture so I don’t think of us always as sort of a gym brand,” he added.
To help support relief efforts following the Los Angeles wildfires, Equinox has recruited the artist Kenny Scharf to collaborate on a T-shirt. The front of the shirt is imprinted with his colorful work and all of the proceeds from the $45 item will benefit the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation. The featured artwork is “Blobz,” an oil-on-canvas creation from 2000 that is a tribute to unity and resilience. Scharf, who has been on the art scene since the 1980s, has work at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Broad Institute and other cultural institutions.
Shai Baitel, Equinox artistic adviser and director of the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, lined up Scharf for the project. The pair are also working on a museum retrospective of the artist’s work.
Van Nurden said, “Kenny just made a lot of sense, as a born and raised Los Angeles artist. The piece itself is a reflection of the community, which stands for unity and resilience. That sort of futuristic promise that is embedded in Kenny’s work is amazing.”
Shoppers at Equinox’s site can also make donations to the LAFD’s Foundation via a link to the latter’s site. Separately from the Scharf initiative, Equinox is planning to have group fitness rally classes, where participants will make donations to join the class and those donations will also benefit the LAFD’s Foundation.
Equinox had to close its newly opened Pacific Palisades club, due to the wildfires in the Los Angeles area.
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