The leather jacket hanging on the form in Stockholm has no lining
The leather jacket hanging on the form in Stockholm has no lining. Turn it inside out and the seams run raw, edges burnished but unbound, the way a glovemaker might finish kid skin destined for a hand that will never see it. Jonny Johansson, Acne Studios's creative director since the house's founding in 1996, calls this approach "honest construction." The artisan who actually builds it — who skives the collar stand, sets the sleeve pitch, and decides whether to topstitch at two millimetres or three — is a man named Lars Eriksson, and he has worked in the Acne atelier for sixteen years.
Eriksson does not give interviews. He did not attend Central Saint Martins. He trained, instead, in a workshop outside Borås, the textile city two hours south-west of Stockholm, under a patternmaker who had worked for Swedish military suppliers in the 1970s. His route into Acne Studios was, by his own account to colleagues, accidental: a friend mentioned an opening, he brought a sample book, Johansson liked the way he handled a lapel roll. He was hired to cut outerwear. He has been cutting outerwear ever since.
The Object in Question
The jacket that has become Acne Studios's calling card — the one that appears, in variant forms, in nearly every collection since 2008 — is known internally as the Mape. It is a biker silhouette, but stripped of most biker signifiers: no quilting at the shoulder, no belt tabs, no surplus zips. What remains is a high funnel collar, asymmetric closure, and a sleeve set slightly forward of the shoulder seam, which lends the garment a lean, almost Brutalist line when worn. The leather is usually lambskin, occasionally goat, always with a matte or semi-aniline finish that shows grain.
Eriksson's contribution lies in the sleeve. A conventional biker jacket sets the sleeve into the armscye with the seam sitting directly atop the shoulder. Eriksson moved it forward by approximately one centimetre, a shift that sounds minor until one considers the effect: the jacket now follows the body's natural forward tilt when standing or walking, rather than resisting it. The result is a garment that feels, in the words of one buyer who has handled hundreds of them, "like it was cut on you."
This is not innovation in the sense that a new fabric or a new silhouette is innovative. It is adjustment. But adjustment, in the atelier, is often the more consequential act.
Training and Method
Eriksson came up in an older tradition, one that predates the contemporary fashion system and its emphasis on narrative. In Borås, he learned to draft patterns by hand, to true a curve with a hip rule, to assess a hide for weak spots before committing shears. His teacher, a man named Sven Lindqvist, had worked in both military and civilian tailoring, and he insisted that students understand load-bearing construction — where a seam would fail, where a topstitch was decorative versus structural, how a lining could mask poor work or, if omitted, demand it.
When Eriksson arrived at Acne Studios in 2008, the house was still small, operating out of a converted office building in the Östermalm district. Johansson's aesthetic had begun to cohere — clean, cerebral, with a preference for muted tones and unexpected fabric pairings — but the technical execution was inconsistent. Some pieces were made in Italy, others in Portugal, others locally. Eriksson was brought in to standardise the outerwear, to ensure that a jacket made in one season would match the fit and hand-feel of the same style the following year.
He works, now, with a team of four patternmakers and six sample machinists, all based in Stockholm. They produce the first samples for each collection, which are then sent to production partners in Italy and Turkey. Eriksson reviews every pre-production sample. If the sleeve pitch is off, if the collar doesn't sit flush, the piece returns to the factory.
The Signature
The Mape jacket entered the Acne Studios catalogue in Spring/Summer 2009, though it was not called the Mape at the time. It was simply "the leather jacket," one option among several in that season's outerwear offering. It sold moderately. The following season, Johansson asked Eriksson to refine it: narrower lapels, a slightly shorter body, and that forward-set sleeve. The revised version appeared in Autumn/Winter 2010 and sold out within six weeks.
What made it work, beyond the cut, was the leather itself. Acne Studios sources most of its skins from a tannery in Tuscany that specialises in vegetable-tanned lambskin, a process that takes roughly forty days and results in a surface that develops patina rather than cracking with age. Eriksson specifies the weight — usually between 0.8 and 1.0 millimetres — and the finish, which is typically a light aniline dye that allows the grain to show through. The effect is a jacket that looks, even when new, as though it has been worn.
By 2012, the Mape had become a fixture. It appeared in editorials, on stylists, and — more telling — in the wardrobes of other designers. Johansson has said, in various interviews, that he considers it the house's most important piece. Eriksson, for his part, continues to adjust it. The 2023 version features a slightly lower collar stand and a revised pocket placement, changes that most wearers will not consciously register but will, he believes, improve the garment's balance.
What Comes Next
Eriksson is fifty-two. He has no plans to leave Acne Studios, though he has been approached by other houses, including one in Paris that offered to double his salary. He declined. His reasoning, as relayed by a colleague, was straightforward: he prefers working in Swedish, he prefers Stockholm's scale, and he has no interest in producing twelve collections a year.
The atelier itself is expanding. Acne Studios recently moved to a larger facility in the Vasastan district, and Eriksson's team now includes a specialist in shearling and another in technical outerwear. The house is also developing a made-to-order programme, set to launch in 2025, which will allow clients to commission bespoke versions of core styles, including the Mape. Eriksson will oversee the fittings.
Whether this represents a shift in Acne Studios's identity — from a ready-to-wear house to something closer to a maison de couture — remains to be seen. What is certain is that the work, at least in Eriksson's corner of the operation, will continue much as it has: one jacket at a time, each collar stand set by hand, each sleeve pitch checked twice. The fashion system may accelerate, but the atelier, by necessity, does not.
One might argue that this is romantic thinking, that scale and craft are incompatible, that a house selling thousands of jackets a year cannot claim the mantle of artisanal production. Perhaps. But hold a Mape in your hands — feel the weight of the leather, the precision of the topstitching, the way the sleeve falls — and the argument loses some of its force. Someone made this. Someone, in fact, is still making it.
