Guinevere Van Seenus

Guinevere Van Seenus is an American model, photographer and artist born in Boston and raised in Washington, D.C. and Santa Barbara, California. She entered modelling as a teenager in Southern California, later moved to London and Paris, and became internationally recognised in the mid-1990s after a major Vogue Italia story photographed by Steven Meisel. Campaigns and editorials with photographers including Paolo Roversi, Craig McDean, David Sims and Mario Testino established her as one of the period’s most distinctive editorial models.

Her career has continued across several decades, spanning runway, campaign and magazine work while expanding into photography and art. Van Seenus has been valued for an ability to shift markedly between austere, romantic, severe and theatrical characters, making her particularly suited to photographers and designers who build images around transformation and variable character.

Van Seenus has a long connection with ERDEM. She walked in the house’s early period, modelled ten archive dresses for the 2015 anniversary portfolio photographed by Sølve Sundsbø and later became the subject of Paul Kooiker’s portrait sequence revisiting women from the ERDEM archive. Her recurrence through the 2025 monograph makes her an important interpreter of the house’s image history, with her role grounded in modelling and performance inside photographs.

Van Seenus approaches modelling as an image-making collaboration. Expression, posture and bodily tension can change radically from one photographer or designer to another, allowing a face and silhouette to register as part of the concept of the picture. Her longevity has depended on this adaptability and on a willingness to occupy unusual, emotionally specific characters.

Her own photographic and artistic work extends that sensitivity behind the camera. Images and objects often retain an interest in material surface, transformation and the constructed nature of fashion imagery, connecting the disciplines of model, photographer and maker without collapsing them into a single role.

For ERDEM, her value comes from the ability to embody different historical and fictional identities across time. The 2015 and later archive projects use the same person to connect dresses from multiple seasons, giving visual continuity to a house whose collections repeatedly change character.