Portrait : le directeur artistique de Acne Studios
The fitting room at Acne Studios' Stockholm headquarters runs the length of the building's top floor, and on a grey afternoon in late September, Jonny Johansson stands at one end of it, arms crossed, watching a model walk toward him in a shearling coat that appears to have been dyed the colour of wet concrete. He tilts his head. The coat is enormous — sleeves past the knuckles, hem grazing the shin — but the proportions hold. He nods once, says something in Swedish to the pattern-cutter beside him, and the model pivots back toward the rack.
This is how Johansson has worked for more than two decades: quietly, incrementally, with an eye trained not on revolution but on refinement. He is not a designer who announces a new chapter every six months. He is a designer who, season after season, returns to the same questions — How much volume can a sleeve carry before it collapses into costume? What does a grey actually do when you place it next to another grey? — and answers them with fractional adjustments. The result is a body of work that feels less like a series of collections than a single, evolving conversation.
Formation
Johansson did not train as a fashion designer. He studied graphic design and fine art at Stockholm's Konstfack, graduating in the mid-nineties with no particular ambition to make clothes. What he had, instead, was a circle of friends — musicians, photographers, artists — and a shared frustration with what was available to wear. In 1996, he and three others pooled their money, bought a hundred pairs of raw denim jeans, and screen-printed them with the name of a friend's film project: Acne. The jeans sold. They made more. By 1997, Acne Studios existed as a registered company, though Johansson has said in interviews that he did not consider himself a designer until several years later.
The early collections were small, often fewer than twenty pieces, and built around a kind of pragmatic minimalism that felt distinctly Nordic without tipping into cliché. Johansson was interested in proportion and texture, not in narrative. A jacket might be cut with sleeves two inches longer than standard; a trouser might sit an inch lower on the hip. These were not gestures. They were adjustments, made with the assumption that the person wearing the garment would notice the difference, even if they could not name it.
He learned on the job. He has spoken about this plainly in the past — no Parsons, no Central Saint Martins, no apprenticeship under a storied couturier. Instead, he worked with pattern-cutters and fabric suppliers, asking questions, making mistakes, refining. The lack of formal training, he has suggested, was both a limitation and a freedom. He was not bound by the conventions of a traditional atelier, which meant he could approach construction from first principles. It also meant that his mistakes were his own.
Virage
The turning point, if one can identify a single moment, came in the mid-2000s, when Johansson began to push against the restraint that had defined Acne Studios' early work. The collections grew larger, more ambitious. He introduced colour — not pastels or brights, but saturated, slightly off tones that felt both deliberate and unstable. A burgundy that leaned toward rust. A pink that suggested something industrial. The silhouettes, too, began to shift. Sleeves ballooned. Trousers widened. Coats hung from the shoulder with a weight that suggested sculpture more than garment.
This was not a wholesale reinvention. Johansson did not abandon the principles that had shaped his work from the beginning. But he allowed himself to exaggerate them, to see how far he could stretch a proportion before it broke. The result was a kind of controlled distortion — clothes that looked, at first glance, almost normal, but revealed themselves, on closer inspection, to be slightly wrong in ways that made them more interesting.
By the time Acne Studios began showing in Paris in 2006, the maison had established a clear identity. It was not minimalist, exactly, though it shared minimalism's interest in reduction. It was not avant-garde, though it borrowed from the avant-garde's willingness to challenge the body's relationship to fabric. It occupied a space between those poles, and Johansson seemed content to remain there, refining rather than reinventing.
Signature
If there is a signature to Johansson's work, it lies not in a single garment or motif but in a set of recurring preoccupations. He returns, season after season, to oversized outerwear — shearling bombers, wool topcoats, padded nylon parkas — cut with enough volume to obscure the body beneath. He returns to denim, treating it not as a casual fabric but as a canvas for experiment: bleached, coated, distressed, reconstructed. He returns to knitwear, often in exaggerated proportions, with sleeves that extend past the wrist or necklines that sit high on the throat.
The palette, too, is consistent. Johansson favours neutrals — grey, black, navy, camel — but he uses them with enough variation that they never feel safe. A grey might be tinged with green, a black might read as charcoal in certain light. When he introduces colour, it tends to be muted, slightly dusty, as though it has been left in the sun for a season.
There is also a persistent interest in the unfinished, the imperfect. Hems are left raw. Seams are exposed. Fabrics are chosen not for their polish but for their texture — a wool that pills, a leather that scuffs, a cotton that wrinkles. This is not carelessness. It is a deliberate choice, rooted in the belief that clothes should bear the marks of their use, that patina is not a flaw but a feature.
What comes next
Johansson is now in his early fifties, and Acne Studios is no longer the small Stockholm collective it was in the nineties. The company is owned by a London-based investment firm, and it operates more than fifty stores worldwide. Johansson remains at the helm, designing four collections a year, but the scale has changed. The question, then, is whether the work can sustain that scale without losing the specificity that made it compelling in the first place.
The most recent collections suggest that Johansson is not particularly interested in answering that question directly. He continues to work in the same register — oversized, textured, slightly off — and if the clothes feel less surprising than they did a decade ago, that may be because the rest of the industry has caught up. What felt radical in 2008 — a coat with sleeves that fell past the fingertips, a trouser with a waist that sat somewhere near the hip bone — is now standard fare on runways from Milan to New York.
But there is something to be said for consistency, for a designer who does not chase trends but instead refines a set of ideas over time. Johansson has built a vocabulary, and he continues to speak it fluently. Whether that is enough, in an industry that rewards novelty above all else, remains to be seen. For now, he is in the fitting room, watching a model walk toward him in a coat the colour of wet concrete, adjusting the sleeve by half an inch, and moving on to the next piece.
