## Three Women Who Shaped Acne Studios

Three Women Who Shaped Acne Studios

Jonny Johansson stands at a fitting table in Stockholm, adjusting the shoulder of a grey wool blazer on a model whose face you wouldn't recognise from a runway. She shifts her weight. He steps back. The sleeve drops a half-centimetre, and the whole silhouette relaxes into something that reads less constructed, more lived-in. This is the Acne method: find the body, then let the garment negotiate.

For two decades, Acne Studios has built its reputation on a kind of studied nonchalance — tailoring that doesn't announce itself, denim that ages before it's sold, knitwear engineered to slump just so. But behind that aesthetic sits a less-discussed fact: the house has been shaped, season after season, by a handful of women whose presence in fittings, campaigns, and collaborations gave Johansson's vision its contours. Three in particular — a stylist, a photographer, and a musician — functioned not as muses in the traditional, decorative sense, but as collaborators who clarified what Acne Studios could be.

Sofie Hernant: The First Silhouette

Sofie Hernant didn't set out to define a brand. In the early 2000s, she was a stylist working between Stockholm and Paris, known for editorial work that favoured wit over polish. When Johansson launched Acne Studios in 1996 — initially as a denim line distributed to friends — Hernant was among the first to wear the jeans in public, and more importantly, to style them in ways that suggested a vocabulary beyond streetwear.

Her contribution was less about singular images than about establishing a grammar. In shoots and at industry events, Hernant paired Acne's raw denim with men's shirting, oversized outerwear, and shoes that didn't match. The effect was studied but never precious. By 2003, when Acne Studios expanded into ready-to-wear, Johansson was already designing with her proportions in mind: the dropped shoulder, the elongated sleeve, the blazer cut to hang rather than nip.

Hernant's influence is clearest in the house's approach to androgyny, which has never been about erasing gender so much as declining to fuss over it. She wore the clothes as though they were borrowed, and Johansson, observing this, began to design as though every piece might be. The result was a wardrobe that refused to perform femininity in the conventional sense, but didn't reject it either. It simply moved on.

She continues to work with Acne Studios intermittently, styling campaigns and collaborating on seasonal direction. But her legacy is structural: she taught the house that a woman in a men's blazer isn't making a statement. She's just dressed.

Viviane Sassen: The Gaze That Doesn't Flatter

Viviane Sassen entered Acne Studios's orbit in 2010, when Johansson hired her to shoot the autumn/winter campaign. Sassen, a Dutch photographer known for work that fractures the body into planes of light and shadow, seemed an odd choice for a brand still associated with Scandinavian minimalism. But Johansson, one suspects, was after precisely that friction.

Sassen's images for Acne Studios don't flatter. They complicate. A model's face is bisected by shadow. An arm is cropped mid-gesture. The clothes — a shearling coat, a ribbed knit, a pair of trousers with an exaggerated break — are present but not central. What dominates instead is a sense of the body as architecture, and the garment as one element within a larger composition.

This approach marked a shift for the house. Where earlier campaigns had leaned on straightforward portraiture, Sassen's work suggested that Acne Studios's clothes didn't need to be seen in full to be understood. A sleeve, a hemline, the way fabric pools at the ankle — these fragments could carry as much information as a lookbook flat. In her hands, the brand's aesthetic became more elliptical, more willing to withhold.

Sassen shot multiple campaigns for Acne Studios between 2010 and 2015, and her influence persists in the house's visual language. Subsequent photographers have adopted her willingness to obscure, to crop, to let a single detail stand in for the whole. It's a grammar that assumes the viewer will do some work, and that the clothes are confident enough to survive partial visibility.

In interviews — notably a 2012 conversation with Aperture — Sassen described her interest in "the space between the body and the garment, where something unresolved happens." Acne Studios, under her gaze, became a house comfortable with that irresolution.

Beca Lipscombe: The Collaborator Who Stayed

Beca Lipscombe is less widely known outside industry circles, but within Acne Studios, she is something close to essential. A stylist and creative consultant based in London, Lipscombe began working with Johansson in 2008, initially on editorial projects. By 2011, she had moved into a more permanent role, shaping seasonal collections from the fitting stage onward.

Her contribution is difficult to photograph. It lives in the way a trouser is tapered, the placement of a pocket, the decision to cut a coat in boiled wool rather than melton. Lipscombe works in the realm of facture — the physical construction of the garment — and her influence is clearest in the house's tailoring, which has grown more refined without losing its slouch.

Colleagues describe her as exacting. In fittings, she'll spend twenty minutes adjusting a shoulder pad, not to achieve a sharper line, but to ensure the jacket still reads as soft. This is the paradox she and Johansson have pursued together: precision in service of ease. The seams are placed exactly where they need to be so that the garment can afford to relax.

Lipscombe has also been instrumental in Acne Studios's collaborations, particularly the ongoing work with other Scandinavian labels and artists. She approaches these projects with a clear sense of what the house is — and isn't. When Acne Studios partnered with Swedish musician Neneh Cherry in 2013, it was Lipscombe who ensured the resulting capsule felt like an extension of the mainline rather than a departure. The pieces were wearable, specific, and free of the self-consciousness that often accompanies designer-musician tie-ups.

She remains on Johansson's team, and her presence is a reminder that influence doesn't require visibility. Some collaborators shape a house by appearing in its campaigns. Others do so by ensuring the sleeve hangs correctly.

What Remains

Acne Studios is not, strictly speaking, a house built on muses. Johansson has never cultivated the kind of singular, obsessive relationships that defined Yves Saint Laurent and his circle, or the way Phoebe Philo's work at Céline seemed to address one ideal woman. But in Hernant, Sassen, and Lipscombe, the brand found something more pragmatic: collaborators who clarified its instincts.

Hernant established the proportions. Sassen complicated the image. Lipscombe refined the construction. Together, they gave Acne Studios a vocabulary that could survive trend cycles, creative director changes, and the pressures of scale. The house now operates in 50 countries, with revenues that place it among Europe's mid-tier success stories. But the clothes still carry the trace of those early collaborations — the sense that someone, somewhere, spent a long time getting the shoulder just so.

One returns, in the end, to that fitting room in Stockholm. Johansson adjusts the blazer. The model shifts. The garment finds its place. And the question, as always, is whether anyone else will notice the work that went into making it look this easy.