The leather jacket hanging on the dress form in Stockholm's Floragatan studio is not yet finished
The leather jacket hanging on the dress form in Stockholm's Floragatan studio is not yet finished. One sleeve sits half an inch longer than the other. The collar, pinned but not sewn, refuses to lie flat. Karin Lundqvist, head of leather development at Acne Studios, circles the form twice before speaking. "We'll strip it back," she says. "Start the shoulder again."
This is how a signature is built — not in the showroom, but in the thirty revisions that precede it. The Acne leather jacket, arguably the house's most recognised silhouette since the early 2000s, passes through Lundqvist's hands at least four times before it reaches production. She has been with the Swedish house for nineteen years. Before that: a technical diploma from Beckmans College of Design, three years at a now-defunct outerwear label in Gothenburg, and a stint pattern-cutting for theatre costumes. She does not sketch. She drapes, pins, and argues with the material until it yields.
The jacket in question — let's call it the Myrtle, after this season's style code — begins as a single hide of Italian lambskin, vegetable-tanned and drum-dyed in a facility outside Florence. Acne Studios sources most of its leather from three tanneries, all within a two-hour radius of each other. Lundqvist visits twice a year. She checks for grain consistency, measures thickness with a hand calliper, and haggles over lead times. The hides arrive in Stockholm roughly eight weeks later.
Pattern-making falls to Emil Svensson, who joined the house in 2017 after a decade at Cheap Monday, back when it was still a going concern. Svensson works in Grafis, the CAD software favoured by most Swedish ready-to-wear studios, but he prints every pattern at full scale and cuts a muslin prototype by hand. "The screen lies," he told Dagens Nyheter in 2022. "You don't see ease until you see it on a body."
The Myrtle's defining feature is its sleeve — set slightly forward, with a rotated bicep seam that allows the arm to hang naturally when the wearer is seated or leaning into a motorcycle's handlebars. This is not an accident. Acne Studios built its reputation, in part, on a biker jacket that actually functioned for riders. Svensson's pattern accounts for a six-degree forward rotation. He learned the geometry from a 1983 Japanese tailoring manual that a colleague brought back from Tokyo. He has never ridden a motorcycle.
Once the muslin passes muster, the pattern moves to Lundqvist's cutting table. Leather, unlike woven cloth, has no grainline to respect — but it does have a topography. Scars, stretch marks, and areas of thinner nap must be mapped and avoided. Lundqvist cuts each panel with a rotary blade, working around imperfections. A single jacket requires between fourteen and sixteen panels, depending on the hide's usable area. Waste runs high. Roughly thirty per cent of each skin ends up in the scrap bin, later sold to a glove-maker in Estonia.
The sewing happens one floor down, in a bright, under-heated room that smells faintly of machine oil. Here, the work falls to a rotating team of six machinists, most of whom have been with Acne Studios for over a decade. The longest-tenured is Agneta Bergström, who started in 2004, the year the house showed its first full ready-to-wear collection. Bergström runs a Durkopp Adler 767 — a walking-foot machine built for heavy leather — and she stitches the Myrtle's shoulder seams at precisely eleven stitches per inch. Any tighter and the leather puckers. Any looser and the seam won't hold under stress.
Bergström does not work from written instructions. She has sewn some version of this jacket more than two thousand times. She knows, without measuring, that the underarm gusset needs a three-millimetre ease allowance, and that the collar stand must be topstitched twice — once at two millimetres from the edge, once at seven — to keep it from collapsing over time. She makes sixty-four kronor per jacket, a piece rate negotiated by her union in 2019. On a good day, she finishes five.
The hardware — zips, snaps, and the small metal tag that sits at the hem — comes from a supplier in Tuscany. The zips are YKK Excella, chosen not for branding but for the way the slider's internal coil meshes without catching. Lundqvist tried a cheaper alternative in 2018. The first production run came back with fourteen per cent of the zips jamming within six months. They reverted.
Finishing is less mechanical. Each jacket is inspected under halogen light, checked for colour consistency, and conditioned with a blend of beeswax and neatsfoot oil. The conditioning is done by hand, using a cotton rag and small circular motions. It takes eleven minutes. The result is a surface with a slight sheen — not glossy, but no longer matte. The jacket will darken and crack with wear, as vegetable-tanned leather does, but the initial finish slows the process.
Acne Studios produces the Myrtle in three weights: 0.8 millimetres for the standard version, 1.0 millimetres for the "heavy" variant, and 0.6 millimetres for a spring style that never quite caught on. Lundqvist prefers the 0.8. "It breaks in without breaking down," she said during a studio visit in 2021, quoted in Bon. "You want the leather to remember you, not disintegrate."
The house does not release production numbers, but industry estimates put the annual output of Acne leather jackets somewhere north of eight thousand units. That figure includes the Myrtle, the older Mock and Nate styles, and a handful of limited collabs. Lundqvist's team touches, at minimum, the first sample of every run. After that, production shifts to a partner atelier in Portugal, where the same pattern is executed by a different set of hands. Lundqvist visits quarterly. She brings a reference jacket, checks the first ten pieces off the line, and measures stitch intervals with a loupe.
What comes next is harder to predict. Lundqvist is fifty-two. She has no formal succession plan, though Svensson has been learning her draping method for the past three years. The house itself, now under Jonny Johansson's creative direction for over two decades, shows no signs of slowing. But the leather trade is tightening. Tanneries are closing. Lead times stretch. The hides that Lundqvist sources today cost forty per cent more than they did in 2019.
Still, the jacket on the dress form will be stripped back, re-cut, and sewn again. Lundqvist will circle it twice, adjust the collar, and release it to the line. Bergström will stitch the shoulders at eleven per inch. Someone in Lisbon or Los Angeles will eventually wear it until the elbows go shiny. And in a Stockholm studio that smells of oil and leather, the next sample is already pinned.
