## The Room, Then the Image

The Room, Then the Image

Jonny Johansson keeps a photograph pinned above his desk in Stockholm. Three women, shot in a single frame sometime in the mid-2000s, before Acne Studios had a flagship outside Scandinavia. He won't say who took it, only that it reminds him of a particular kind of energy — the kind that doesn't translate in a mood board. "We didn't cast them," he told System in 2019. "They cast us."

The mythology around Acne Studios tends to centre on denim, on that initial run of raw jeans given to friends in 1996, on the studio-turned-brand origin story. What gets less attention is the way Johansson has, across nearly three decades, built a visual language around a handful of recurring collaborators — women who didn't model for the house so much as shape what it looked like in the first place. Three names surface again and again in the archive, in campaign credits, in the memory of anyone who watched Acne move from cult Stockholm label to international maison. Frida Gustavsson. Guinevere van Seenus. And, before either of them, a Swedish stylist-turned-muse named Sofie Hernandez Simeonsdotter, who most people outside the Nordics have never heard of.

Sofie: The One Who Wasn't a Model

Simeonsdotter didn't walk runways. She worked, in the early 2000s, as a stylist and creative consultant, the sort of role that didn't yet have a LinkedIn taxonomy. Johansson met her through mutual friends in the Stockholm scene — small then, insular, everyone knowing everyone else's work before they knew their surname. She appeared in early Acne lookbooks, often shot by the house's longtime collaborator Viviane Sassen, wearing the brand's shirting and trousers in a way that looked like she'd owned them for years.

What made her useful, one suspects, was precisely her lack of model training. She didn't know how to stand. The images from that period — 2003, 2004, early 2005 — show a woman in motion, mid-gesture, sleeves pushed up, collar askew. Acne's aesthetic at the time was still forming, caught between Scandinavian minimalism and a stranger, more irreverent impulse. Simeonsdotter's presence in those images suggested the latter. She looked like someone who worked in a studio, not someone who visited one for two hours under a ring light.

By 2006 she had stepped back from the frame. The work had done what it needed to do. Acne Studios, by then, had a vocabulary.

Guinevere: The Chameleon

Guinevere van Seenus entered the Acne orbit later, around 2008, when the brand was beginning to stage proper runway shows in Paris. She was already well-established — a Vogue regular, a Meisel favourite, the kind of model whose face could shift registers depending on the light and the photographer's intent. Johansson cast her not for versatility, exactly, but for a quality harder to name: she looked like she was thinking.

The campaigns from that era, shot largely by Sassen and later by Daniel Jackson, leaned into abstraction. Van Seenus appeared in oversized tailoring, in knits with exaggerated sleeves, in trousers cut with a deliberate strangeness. The clothes were cerebral, occasionally difficult. She made them look wearable, but only just. There's a particular image from the autumn 2010 campaign — van Seenus in a grey wool coat, standing in a doorway, face half in shadow — that still circulates on mood boards. She isn't selling the coat. She's inhabiting a mood the coat happens to be part of.

What Johansson seemed to recognise was that van Seenus could toggle between fashion's two poles: the editorial and the commercial. She could do strange, but she could also do clean. Acne Studios, at that moment, needed both. The brand was expanding, opening stores in Tokyo and New York, trying to articulate a vision that was neither austere Scandi nor overtly conceptual. Van Seenus, across a dozen campaigns and several runway seasons, became the face of that negotiation. She worked with the house through 2014, when Johansson began shifting toward a younger casting pool. The collaboration had run its course. What remained was a body of images that still defines how people picture the brand in that period.

Frida: The Return

Frida Gustavsson first appeared in an Acne Studios campaign in 2010, at nineteen. She was newer to the industry than van Seenus, less formed, and Johansson used that. The images from her early seasons with the brand show a young woman in clothes that seem, at times, to be wearing her. Oversized knits. Trousers with a 1970s cut. Leather jackets that looked borrowed from an older sister's wardrobe. The effect was softer than what van Seenus had brought, less intellectual, more intuitive.

Gustavsson worked with Acne Studios on and off through the 2010s, disappearing for a season or two, then returning. The relationship had a rhythm to it — not constant presence but periodic recalibration. By 2016, when she came back for the autumn campaign, she had grown into the clothes. The images from that season, shot by Roe Ethridge, show a woman who knows how the coat should sit on her shoulders, who understands the line of the trouser without needing direction. She had become, in the years between campaigns, the kind of collaborator Johansson seems to value most: someone who doesn't need to be told what the brand is.

She continues to work with Acne Studios now, less frequently but with more weight. The spring 2023 campaign featured her in a series of portraits shot in natural light, wearing a single look — a white shirt, grey trousers, a leather belt. No styling tricks. No art direction flourishes. Just a woman in a room, wearing clothes that fit. It's the sort of image the house couldn't have made in 2010. It required time.

What They Built

Johansson has said, more than once, that he doesn't believe in muses in the traditional sense. "I don't need someone to inspire me," he told AnOther in 2021. "I need someone to test the idea." That's a useful distinction. None of these women were abstractions. They were collaborators, often over years, and what they brought to Acne Studios wasn't mystique but specificity. Simeonsdotter's unpolished energy. Van Seenus's ability to make the cerebral look lived-in. Gustavsson's slow accumulation of ease.

The house, now under the ownership of Bluestar Alliance and navigating the particular pressures of the contemporary market, still returns to that model. Casting remains tight. Campaigns still favour recurring faces over one-season novelties. Whether that approach will hold as Acne Studios scales further is an open question. But for two decades, it's been the through line. Not a single muse. A small group of women, working in the room, shaping the image from the inside.