The fitting room at Acne Studios' Stockholm headquarters smells faintly of steam and wool

The fitting room at Acne Studios' Stockholm headquarters smells faintly of steam and wool. Jonny Johansson stands beside a rail of outerwear, pulling a sleeve straight on a parka that won't arrive in shops for another six months. He tugs, steps back, tugs again. The garment is somewhere between military surplus and Scandi pragmatism — a jacket that reads as both and neither. This is the tension he's worked in for twenty-seven years.

Johansson didn't train as a designer. He studied economics and business at university, then pivoted to what he calls "making things" without the credential of a fashion degree. In 1996, he and three friends — Mikael Schiller, Mikael Johansson, and Torsten Valeur — founded Acne as a creative collective. The name, an acronym for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions, came first. The jeans came second. One hundred pairs in raw red-selvedge denim, given to friends in Stockholm's art and music scenes. The fit was straight, the waist sat low, and the branding was minimal to the point of absence. Within two years, the jeans were stocked in Paris and London. By 2001, Johansson had stepped into the role of creative director, overseeing ready-to-wear while the collective's other arms — film, furniture, graphics — spun off or folded.

He learned on the job. Early collections leaned heavily on denim and knitwear, categories forgiving enough for a self-taught designer to master through repetition and conversation with manufacturers. What Johansson lacked in technical draughtsmanship, he compensated for with a sharp eye for proportion and an instinct for the slightly wrong detail — a sleeve an inch too long, a placket that closed left over right instead of right over left. These weren't mistakes. They were adjustments that made a garment feel considered without announcing itself.

The Pivot

The breakthrough, if one can isolate a single moment, came in the mid-2000s. Acne Studios — the apparel arm now distinct from the broader collective — began showing in Paris. The collections were spare, often monochrome, built around outerwear and shirting that borrowed from workwear and military archives but refused to cosplay either. A trench coat might have the volume of a greatcoat but the clean front of a lab coat. A bomber jacket came in boiled wool instead of nylon, its ribbing replaced with a flat knit collar. Johansson wasn't deconstructing these references so much as translating them into a language that felt native to Stockholm: functional, restrained, quietly discordant.

The press took notice. By 2008, Acne Studios had opened its first flagship on Rue Malher in Paris, a raw-concrete space that felt more like an artist's studio than a boutique. The aesthetic — unfinished surfaces, industrial fixtures, garments hung on steel rails — became a template the brand would replicate in cities from New York to Tokyo. It also became a template others would borrow. The minimal-retail look, now ubiquitous, owes a debt to what Johansson and his team built in that Marais storefront.

But the pivot wasn't just spatial. It was tonal. Acne Studios began to occupy a category that didn't quite exist before: not avant-garde, not commercial, but something in between. The clothes were wearable in the way a Comme des Garçons piece often isn't, yet they carried an oddness that set them apart from the polished minimalism of Jil Sander or The Row. A pink oversided coat. A scarf so long it doubled as a blanket. A face-logo sweatshirt that became, against all odds, a bestseller. Johansson seemed to understand that strangeness, deployed in small doses, could be a form of accessibility.

The Signature

If there's a through-line in Johansson's work, it's the refusal to settle into a single mood. One season skews austere — charcoal suiting, narrow trousers, shirts buttoned to the throat. The next veers into colour: acid yellow parkas, cobalt blue knits, a magenta shearling coat that sold out within weeks. He moves between these poles without apology, and without the narrative scaffolding that many designers use to justify a shift. There's rarely a grand concept. In a 2018 interview with System, Johansson said he prefers to start with fabric and silhouette rather than mood boards or thematic statements. The work, he suggested, should speak for itself.

What does speak, consistently, is the tailoring. Acne Studios' suiting has a looseness that reads as ease rather than sloppiness. Trousers sit just below the natural waist, cut straight through the leg with a slight break at the ankle. Jackets have a soft shoulder and a longer-than-expected body, which gives them a slouch that feels earned rather than affected. The effect is neither sharp nor sloppy — it's the third option, the one that requires a good eye and a confident cutter.

The accessories, too, carry this logic. The Musubi bag, introduced in 2018, takes its name from the Japanese knot used to tie an obi. The design — two knotted straps forming the closure — is sculptural without being precious. It photographs well, which matters in an image-driven market, but it also functions: the knot adjusts to accommodate varying loads, and the leather softens with wear. It's become one of the house's most recognisable pieces, a rarity for a brand that has historically resisted logo-heavy merchandising.

What Comes Next

Acne Studios was acquired by Lanvin Group in 2021, a move that raised questions about whether the brand would retain its identity under new ownership. So far, the answer appears to be yes. Johansson remains in place, and the collections haven't shifted toward the kind of commercial softness that often follows private equity involvement. If anything, recent seasons have doubled down on the house's idiosyncrasies: oversized outerwear, unexpected colour pairings, a refusal to court trend cycles.

In conversation, Johansson tends to deflect questions about legacy or influence. He's more comfortable talking about fabric weights or the mechanics of a particular sleeve. This isn't false modesty — it's a reflection of how he works. The clothes come first. The narrative, if it exists at all, is something others construct after the fact.

Which brings us back to the fitting room. The parka Johansson was adjusting earlier in the day will likely be photographed on a runway, styled six different ways, dissected by critics, and either embraced or ignored by buyers. But in this moment, it's just a jacket that doesn't yet sit right. He pulls the sleeve again, nods, and moves to the next piece on the rail. The work continues, as it has for nearly three decades, one adjustment at a time.