The fitting room at Acne Studios, circa 2009, was not designed for sentiment
The fitting room at Acne Studios, circa 2009, was not designed for sentiment. White walls, concrete floor, a single mirror leaned against the plaster. Jonny Johansson stood to one side, arms crossed, watching a model named Anna Ewers turn in a pair of raw denim jeans cut so low the waistband barely cleared her hip bones. She looked, in the parlance of the time, like a Swedish art student who had just rolled out of someone else's bed. Which was, of course, the point.
Acne Studios — the acronym stands for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions, a name that has aged about as well as you would expect — built its reputation on a very specific kind of woman. Not an archetype, exactly. More a recurring mood: androgynous, unsmiling, vaguely Scandinavian even when she was not. The house never codified this in a lookbook manifesto or a brand deck. It simply cast the same three faces, over and over, until the rest of the industry caught on.
Anna Ewers: The Blueprint
Ewers was seventeen when she first walked for Acne Studios in 2010. She had the proportions of a Modigliani and the affect of someone who had never heard of Modigliani. Johansson, who rarely speaks in interviews and almost never about his casting choices, made an exception for System magazine in 2012. "Anna doesn't perform," he said. "She inhabits." The distinction mattered. Acne Studios was then in the middle of its pivot from denim atelier to ready-to-wear contender, and the clothes — oversoi-sized blazers, slip dresses cut on the bias, trousers that pooled at the ankle — required a body that refused to sell them.
Ewers gave the house that refusal. In the Spring/Summer 2011 campaign, shot by Viviane Sassen in a Stockholm car park, she wore a shearling coat over bare legs and stared past the camera as though it were a minor inconvenience. The image circulated widely, not because it was provocative, but because it was cold. Acne Studios was not interested in seduction. It was interested in presence.
By 2013, Ewers had become the house's de facto ambassador, appearing in twelve consecutive campaigns. She wore the oversized knitwear, the ankle boots with the stacked heel, the leather biker jacket that would eventually become the house's single most-copied silhouette. She also wore very little makeup, which was radical at the time in a way that is difficult to remember now. The no-makeup makeup look has since been strip-mined by every brand with a Glossier budget, but in the early 2010s it read as a refusal of the hyper-contoured, hyper-feminine aesthetic that dominated both runway and street style. Acne Studios leaned into that refusal, and Ewers was the face of it.
She left the house's roster in 2015, around the time she signed an exclusive with Dior. The split was amicable, as these things go, but it marked a shift. Acne Studios needed a new centre of gravity.
Vanessa Axente: The Minimalist
Axente arrived in 2013, a Hungarian model with a shaved head and cheekbones that could cut glass. She was, in many ways, the logical successor to Ewers: tall, pale, severe. But where Ewers had projected indifference, Axente projected something closer to asceticism. She looked like she had taken a vow.
Johansson cast her in the Autumn/Winter 2014 campaign, which remains one of the house's most frequently referenced. The images, shot by Daniel Jackson in a brutalist apartment in Stockholm, featured Axente in a series of monochrome looks: a black wool coat over a black turtleneck, a grey cashmere sweater with grey trousers, a white shirt worn with white jeans. The styling was so minimal it bordered on conceptual. One suspected that if you removed a single element, the entire composition would collapse.
Axente's tenure at Acne Studios coincided with the house's most commercially successful period. The Canada scarf — a wool blanket scarf with an oversized logo patch — became a street-style fixture, photographed outside every fashion week from New York to Seoul. The Jensen boot, a Chelsea-style ankle boot with a Cuban heel, sold out repeatedly. The Velocite jacket, a cropped leather biker with asymmetric zips, was copied so aggressively by fast-fashion brands that Acne Studios eventually stopped producing it in black, offering only burgundy and forest green.
Axente appeared in campaigns for all of it. She wore the scarf wrapped twice around her neck, the boots with cropped trousers, the jacket over a slip dress. She made it look easy, which is to say she made it look difficult. The house's aesthetic had always depended on a certain studied carelessness — the sense that the wearer had thrown on the first thing she found and happened to look extraordinary — and Axente embodied that contradiction. She was deliberate in her refusal to appear deliberate.
She worked with Acne Studios through 2017, by which point the house had opened standalone stores in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. The expansion brought new pressures. The clothes needed to appeal to a broader audience without losing the specificity that had made them covetable in the first place. Johansson, ever the pragmatist, began casting models who could bridge that gap.
Selena Forrest: The Disruptor
Forrest was twenty-one when she debuted for Acne Studios in 2018. She was also Black, which should not have been notable but was. The house had been criticised, quietly but persistently, for its lack of diversity — a charge that applied to much of the Scandinavian fashion establishment but stung nonetheless. Forrest's casting was read, by some, as a corrective. By others, as overdue.
What is less debatable is that Forrest brought a different energy. She smiled in campaigns, which none of her predecessors had done. She wore colour: a fuchsia trench coat, a cobalt blue sweater, a canary yellow puffer jacket. The clothes themselves had not changed — Acne Studios remained committed to its vocabulary of oversized silhouettes and muted palettes — but the way they were presented had. Forrest made them feel less austere, more approachable. Whether that was a good thing depended on whom you asked.
The Spring/Summer 2019 campaign, shot by Roe Ethridge in a Los Angeles parking garage, featured Forrest in a series of looks that played with proportion: a cropped blazer over wide-leg jeans, a shrunken cardigan with a floor-length skirt, a boxy leather jacket worn off one shoulder. The styling was still minimal, but it had a looseness that felt new. Forrest moved through the images with a kind of ease that suggested she was not performing ease, which is the hardest trick to pull off.
She continues to work with the house, though less frequently now. Acne Studios has begun casting a rotating group of faces rather than relying on a single muse, a shift that reflects both the fragmentation of the fashion calendar and the economics of social media. It is harder, now, to build a brand around one woman when the algorithm rewards constant novelty.
What Remains
Johansson, who is fifty-two and still the creative director, has not given a substantial interview in three years. Acne Studios is now owned by a London-based investment firm, and the pressure to grow — to open more stores, to launch more categories, to capture more market share — is considerable. The house introduced a beauty line in 2021, which was met with the kind of polite indifference reserved for expensive mistakes.
What has not changed is the casting. The women who walk for Acne Studios still have that look: angular, unsmiling, vaguely Scandinavian even when they are not. One suspects that if Johansson were pressed on the matter, he would say that he is simply casting the clothes. That the women are secondary to the cut, the fabric, the line. But fashion, in the end, is not about clothes. It is about the bodies that move through them, and the stories those bodies tell. Acne Studios understood that early, and built a house on it.
