Anti-Glamour as a Discipline

Jürgen Teller built an entire career on refusing to make things look beautiful in the conventional sense. His photographs feel like they were taken by accident—unflattering angles, flat light, subjects caught mid-thought—and that deliberate rawness is precisely the point. When adidas asked him to shoot the EQT campaign on Berlin’s streets, it made a certain kind of sense: the city has always attracted people who prefer their edges visible.

The EQT line has an interesting design history. It originated in the early 90s as adidas’s attempt to strip performance footwear down to pure function—Equipment, hence EQT—and the reissued silhouettes carry that minimalism forward. The tagline they used, "everything that is essential, nothing that is not," could describe Teller’s photographic philosophy just as easily as it describes the shoes.

Berlin’s streets do something specific to fashion imagery. The worn facades, the grey light, the persistent sense that anything decorative is slightly suspect—the city resists the fantasy that most fashion photography sells. Teller leans into that. The resulting images sit somewhere between document and advertisement, which is where his work has always lived anyway. The models almost disappear into the background, which is somehow the whole point.