Lutz & Alex Climbing a Tree commemorates Tillmans's long friendship.

Europe early nineties, when raves and buzz cuts were still cool, not just the next millennial hipster fad. Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans was right in the middle of it all, together with his high school friends Lutz and Alex. The threesome met when they were 13 and remained best friends ever since. It’s possible not going out with your friends might be the key to a long lasting friendship. Just sayin’.

After high school, these best friends moved to Hamburg to serve 20 months in community service, in order to avoid the draft. Instead of heading to boot camp they helped out the elderly and the disabled during the day and went to raves at night. Needless to say they partied, hard.

In 1992, Wolfgang shot the now famous series of his two friends, memorable for its fashionable nakedness and ultimate 90’s feel. Lutz and Alex were the original androgynous couple. Like their names, their looks were non-binary long before that was even a mainstream term. The two were sometimes hard to tell apart, with their short hair, same height and same build. Some call them the Adam and Eve of the ecstasy generation.

As I said, Lutz & Alex Climbing a Tree are part of a series, all featuring Lutz and Alex. The complete series was published in i-D magazine, as a fashion article because, “it’s the only space in a magazine where you can just show pictures for what they are.” That doesn’t mean his pictures were meaningless or an easy score. Wolfgang wanted to bring his ideas of sexuality into the context of i-D. Lutz and Alex are naked, but rather than picturing the women as a sexploited object, Lutz and Alex are partners. Wolfgang feels that this picture in particular pictures the women and man as equally exposed. Since going bare bosomed wasn’t equal in the genders (oh wait... it still isn’t) he pictured Lutz bottomless and Alex topless.

This wasn't the first time Wolfgang had used his friends as models. As a teenager, photos of Lutz and Alex were all he took. That, and selfies pretending to be at some cool London nightclub, dressed up as New Romantics. New Romantics has nothing to do with our babe T-Swift tho, go find images of Boy George and Adam Ant, you’ll get the idea.