The Cal Pirelli 2025 between beauty, nudity and a return to basics

It is entitled "Refresh and Reveal" and bears the signature of American Ethan James Green the Pirelli Calendar 2025. The official presentation, as per tradition, will take place in November, but the backstage already reveals a lot about this calendar which, as the young photographer emphasises, is intended to represent "a return to the origins and essence of photography".

The set is in Miami and the setting is that of Historic Virginia Beach Park, a timeless place, "perfect, wild, where beauty cohabits with nature", defines the project's stylist, Tonne Goodman, a career spent shooting with leading photographers such as Bruce Weber or Peter Lindbergh and a woman whose influence spans four decades recounted through sophisticated fashion images on the covers of 'Vogue'.

The protagonists of the next 12 months are three men and nine women, including the Italian Elodie: Simone Ashley, Martine Gutierrez, Hoyeon Jung, Padma Lakshmi, Hunter Schafer, Jenny Shimizu, Connie Fleming, Jodie Turner-Smith, Vincent Cassel, John Boyega and Ethan James Green himself. A real journey into 'beauty', declined in all its forms and meanings, is the backdrop to 2025. "Beauty is something internal, that happens within us, when it happens you immediately recognise it," says Green. But beauty, in its chameleon-like nature, is also "self-confidence and self-acceptance" says Padma Lakshmi or a form "of spirituality" according to John Boyega. And again: beauty is pure 'kindness' for Simone Ashley, 'movement and energy' for Elodie or 'an emotion' for Goodman. Different meanings for equally marked identities thus follow one another in hundreds of shots from which only twelve will be selected, probably those that will best succeed in conveying the essence of photography that Green wants to reach and the idea of beauty in its many nuances.

Refresh and Reveal, it was said. Literally translated, refresh and reveal. "Refresh for me means a return to the origins but with something that makes it feel more contemporary. While revealing means showing the skin, the body,' Green explained during a meeting held at the end of June during the two-day shoot in Miami. So nudity is back in the 2025 calendar, an elegant and barely hinted at nudity, because, Goodman explains, "the concept of unveiling is not just about showing skin but revealing it, it's a way of expressing a person's identity, just how you 'discover' them".

It is from these concepts, then, that the real challenge of the 51st edition of the Pirelli Calendar starts, and of the person who will shoot it, the Michingan boy, based in New York, 34 years old, a former career as a model. Green does not hide his emotion and excitement at being included in the privileged 'list' of photographers of the iconic The Cal: "They called me on my birthday, asked me if I wanted to do it and it was exciting. It represents a new milestone for me. I feel like when I photographed my first Vogue cover or when I published my first photo book'. A significant milestone for someone who, like Green, started out in the world of photography almost as a joke, with a few shots of close friends: "I wanted to be a photographer when I was 14, and then a few years later I thought I could be a model, I would go to art school in Detroit instead of going to university," Green says. "I started travelling to New York when I was 17 and did that for a few years and then in my early 20s I started taking pictures again. I didn't want to do them for fashion, I thought portraits, so I started taking pictures of my friends in the park near my flat on the Lower East Side. Through this experience I made new friends, people who came to NY for fashion and art, they would arrive with their clothes and outfits at my flat, we would have an iced coffee, choose clothes together, and shoot digitally so I could show them previews of the shots. The roots of my work began as collaborations and everything started from there'.