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Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta are keen advocates of authenticity. The duo's bicoastal avant-garde brand brings its collections to life with the help of IRL friends and family, an ever-expanding community that includes everyone from Bushwick art kids to Chinatown senior citizens. Eckhaus Latta's spring/summer 17 collection riffed on themes of ritual, movement, and connection, as does its consequent ad campaign. It shows real people having real sex. The diverse couples, both straight and queer, were shot by Korean-German photographer Heji Shin wearing Eckhaus Latta's boxy knit sweaters, airy button-down shirts, printed leggings, and fresh denim, though slightly more disarranged than they were on the runway. The campaign plays on the idea that sex sells while presenting a sex-positive message to the brand's young audience.

Heji's starting point for the campaign was a German sex ed book she shot for teenagers in 2011. Her previous subjects had ranged from fashion models and Miley Cyrus to animals at the zoo, but she jumped at the opportunity to do something very different and very NSFW, yet very beautiful. The German-Korean photographer seems to share Eckhaus Latta's belief that people are as important as products. That, and she simply likes a good challenge. i-D talked to Heji about adolescence, Craigslist casting calls, and why she doesn't care if people see her work as tasteless.

How did the idea of using real couples having sex arise?
The idea came from an existing work that I did years ago for a sex ed book in Germany. We were talking about the relationship between sexuality and fashion advertising and wanted to approach this issue in a different way. As fashion advertising mostly plays with sexuality, we wanted to show sex as natural and direct as it would be possible to in the context of an advertisement. The idea was really interesting because it can be interpreted in so many