Acne Studios : les artisans qui font le travail
The atelier sits on the third floor of a converted warehouse in Stockholm's Södermalm district, where light slants in at angles that change by the hour. On a Thursday in late November, a woman in a linen apron is pinning muslin to a dress form, adjusting the shoulder seam by two millimetres, then stepping back to assess. Her name is Lina Sjöström. She has worked at Acne Studios for eleven years. You will not find her name on the label.
This is not an oversight. It is structure.
Acne Studios, founded in 1996 by Jonny Johansson and three partners as a creative collective, has built its reputation on a studied tension between Scandinavian restraint and a kind of knowing, off-kilter glamour. The jeans came first — raw denim, given away to friends in Stockholm, then sold when demand outpaced goodwill. The silhouette that followed, season after season, has been described as intellectual, ironic, occasionally difficult. But the work itself, the making, has always been a matter of craft before concept. And craft, by definition, requires hands.
Sjöström is one of them. So is Anders Nordqvist, a pattern cutter who joined the house in 2008 after a decade at a tailoring firm in Gothenburg. And Karin Eklund, who oversees leather finishing and has spent the better part of her career learning how vegetable-tanned calfskin behaves under tension. These are not names that appear in press releases. They do not take bows at the end of a runway show. But without them, the collection does not exist.
The work behind the work
Consider the Acne Studios 'Jensen' boot, introduced in 2014 and still in production. It is a Chelsea boot, which is to say it belongs to a category so well-established that innovation seems almost beside the point. And yet the Jensen reads as unmistakably Acne: the toe slightly squared, the elastic gusset set a fraction lower than convention dictates, the leather burnished in a way that suggests wear before the first step is taken.
That burnishing is Eklund's domain. She works with a small team in a separate room, away from the main cutting tables, where the air smells faintly of wax and solvent. The process involves hand-applying a pigment wash, then buffing it back in irregular passes so that the high points catch light and the recesses hold shadow. It takes roughly forty minutes per boot. It cannot be rushed. When I ask her, through a translator, whether she finds the repetition tedious, she shrugs. "It is the same gesture, yes. But the leather is never the same twice."
This is the reality of atelier work. It is not romantic in the way a campaign image is romantic. It is specific, often slow, and requires a tolerance for nuance that does not photograph well. Nordqvist, the pattern cutter, describes his role as "translating an idea into geometry." Johansson will sketch, or more often show him a reference — a vintage Jil Sander blazer, a photograph of a 1970s car coat — and Nordqvist will draft the pattern, adjusting for the weight of the fabric, the drape, the way the garment should move on a body that is not standing still. He works in increments of five millimetres. A sleeve pitch that is off by a centimetre can collapse a silhouette.
Training, and what it costs
None of these artisans arrived at Acne Studios fully formed. Sjöström studied at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, a three-year programme that emphasises technical skill over conceptual theatre. Nordqvist apprenticed under a master tailor in Gothenburg, a man he describes, with evident affection, as "impossible to please." Eklund came up through a leather goods manufacturer in southern Sweden, where she spent two years doing nothing but edge finishing — the process of sealing and polishing the raw edge of a cut piece of leather so that it does not fray or crack.
This kind of training is increasingly rare. The fashion industry, particularly at the level of accessible luxury where Acne Studios operates, has largely moved toward speed and volume. Patterns are graded digitally. Samples are made overseas. The feedback loop between designer and maker has lengthened, sometimes to the point of breaking. Acne Studios, to its credit, has resisted this. The main atelier remains in Stockholm. Fittings happen on-site. When a sleeve does not sit correctly, Johansson can walk fifteen metres and speak directly to the person who cut it.
But this model is not without cost. Sjöström earns a salary that is, by Swedish standards, comfortable but not extravagant. She works regular hours. She has no equity in the brand. When Acne Studios was sold to Investor AB in 2019, in a deal reportedly worth north of €300 million, her life did not materially change. This is not a complaint, she clarifies. It is simply the terms of the arrangement. "I make clothes," she says. "Jonny makes a brand."
Signature, and its limits
The garment most associated with Acne Studios is probably the 'Canada' scarf, a oversized wool piece that first appeared in 2010 and has since become a fixture of northern European winter dressing. It is simple to the point of severity: no fringe, no pattern, just a large rectangle of felted wool in one of two dozen colours. The construction, however, is less simple. The edges are not hemmed but rather felted during the milling process, which requires precise control of temperature and agitation. If the wool felts too much, the scarf becomes stiff. Too little, and it pills.
The milling is done by a supplier in Italy, a family-run operation that also works with Loro Piana and The Row. But the colour development happens in Stockholm, under the direction of a textile specialist named Malin Fors, who has been with Acne Studios since 2012. She describes the process as "a negotiation between what Jonny wants and what wool can do." The 'Powder Pink' that appeared in the autumn 2018 collection, for instance, required seven rounds of sampling before the shade was approved. The issue was not the colour itself but the way it shifted under different light — warm in daylight, grey under fluorescent. Johansson wanted it to hold.
This level of attention is what separates a house like Acne Studios from a brand that simply commissions product. But it also raises a question: whose signature is this, exactly? Johansson is the creative director. His vision shapes the collection. But Fors chose the dye lot. Eklund burnished the leather. Nordqvist cut the pattern. At what point does authorship become collaborative, and at what point does collaboration erase individual contribution?
The house does not answer this question directly. In interviews, Johansson tends to speak in the first person plural — "we wanted," "we felt" — which is either generous or strategic, depending on one's view. The artisans themselves seem unbothered. When I ask Nordqvist whether he feels his work is sufficiently recognised, he pauses. "Recognised by whom?" he says. "The people who matter know."
What comes next
Acne Studios is now part of a larger portfolio. Investor AB, the Swedish investment firm that acquired the brand, also holds stakes in companies ranging from industrial equipment to pharmaceuticals. The fashion operation is, in this context, a relatively small concern. But it is also a visible one, and visibility brings pressure. There is an expectation of growth — more stores, more collaborations, more product categories. The question, for those who work in the atelier, is whether that growth can happen without diluting the work itself.
Sjöström is cautiously optimistic. "We are not making fifty thousand units of anything," she says. "Even the scarf, which sells well, is still made in controlled batches. As long as that remains true, the work remains possible." Nordqvist is less certain. He notes that the company has begun to introduce more knitwear, which is produced externally, and that the balance between in-house and outsourced production has shifted slightly in recent seasons. "It is not a crisis," he says. "But it is a direction."
Eklund, for her part, is focused on a different concern. She worries about succession. The skills she has spent two decades refining are not easily taught. "You can show someone the technique in an afternoon," she says. "But to understand how the leather responds, to know when to stop buffing — that takes years. And I am not sure how many people are willing to spend years anymore."
This is the unspoken tension in any discussion of artisanal work within a commercial fashion house. The brand benefits from the aura of craft, the suggestion that each piece is touched by human hands. But the humans themselves are, in the end, employees. They are paid for their time, not their authorship. And when they retire, or leave, or simply decide that forty minutes per boot is no longer tenable, the brand will find someone else. Or it will automate. Or it will quietly shift production somewhere less expensive and hope that no one notices the difference.
For now, the work continues. Sjöström pins muslin. Nordqvist drafts patterns. Eklund burnishes leather. The names remain unprinted. The hands remain essential.
