The fitting room at Acne Studios' Stockholm headquarters smells faintly of steam and sizing spray
The fitting room at Acne Studios' Stockholm headquarters smells faintly of steam and sizing spray. It is 2012, and Jonny Johansson is pinning a grey wool coat on a woman who stands very still, arms slightly raised. She is not a model in the professional sense. She is Sofia Coppola, in town for a few days, and Johansson has asked her to try a prototype. The coat will not appear in that season's lookbook under her name, but certain proportions — the dropped shoulder, the way the sleeve breaks at the wrist — will carry forward into the collection. This is how Acne Studios has always worked. Not with muses in the traditional sense, but with women whose presence in the studio leaves a mark on the cloth.
Three women, in particular, have shaped the house over two decades. Not as faces of campaigns, though two have appeared in them. Not as creative directors, though their influence runs through multiple collections. They are collaborators in the older sense: women whose lives, work, and way of moving through the world gave Johansson and his team a set of references that became, over time, part of the house vocabulary.
Sofia Coppola: The Collaborator Who Didn't Need a Title
Coppola's relationship with Acne Studios began around 2008, shortly after Marie Antoinette and well before the term 'brand ambassador' colonised every press release. She wore the clothes. Johansson sent her pieces. Eventually, she began appearing in the studio when schedules allowed, offering notes on fit and fabric that were, by multiple accounts, specific and unsparing.
What she brought to the house was not glamour — Acne Studios has never been especially interested in that — but a kind of relaxed precision. Coppola's own wardrobe, documented in paparazzi shots and red-carpet appearances, leaned toward the kind of pieces that photograph as simple and cost more than they look. A grey crewneck sweater. Straight-leg trousers with no visible hardware. A black leather jacket cut close but not tight. These are now Acne Studios signatures, but in the late 2000s they were still being worked out in the atelier.
The collaboration formalised briefly in 2015, when Coppola directed a short film for the house. The film itself — a few minutes of a young woman dressing, smoking, walking through Los Angeles — is less important than what it clarified. Acne Studios was not interested in aspiration. It was interested in women who had taste and didn't need to announce it.
Johansson told System magazine in 2016 that Coppola "understands the difference between looking at something and wearing it." He did not elaborate, but the distinction is worth sitting with. Many designers build collections around the former. Acne Studios, at least in its best years, has built them around the latter.
Hari Nef: The Face Who Rewrote the Template
Hari Nef walked into Acne Studios' orbit in 2015, a year before she appeared in Transparent, and at a moment when the fashion industry was beginning to reckon, unevenly, with trans visibility. She was cast in the Spring/Summer 2016 campaign alongside models and non-models, shot by Viviane Sassen in a series of images that were graphic, strange, and determinedly unflattering in the way that high-fashion imagery sometimes is when it wants to signal seriousness.
What Nef brought to Acne Studios was not representation in the narrow sense — though that mattered — but a sharpness of self-presentation that aligned with the house's emerging identity. She was not interested in softness or in making herself easy to categorise. In interviews from that period, she spoke about fashion as a language she was learning to speak fluently, and about the difference between being looked at and being seen. Acne Studios, for its part, seemed to understand that distinction.
Nef appeared in subsequent campaigns and walked in the brand's runway shows through 2017. More importantly, her presence in the studio during fittings and castings shifted the way the design team thought about proportion and attitude. Johansson mentioned in a 2017 Dazed interview that Nef's feedback on a leather trench — she wanted the belt longer, the armholes higher — led to adjustments that carried into the final production run.
The leather trench became one of Acne Studios' most-copied pieces in the late 2010s. One suspects Nef would find that amusing.
Alexa Chung: The Unlikely Anchor
Alexa Chung's association with Acne Studios is the longest of the three, beginning in 2007 and continuing, in various forms, through the present. She has worn the clothes more consistently than almost anyone outside the design team. She has appeared in campaigns. She has, on at least two occasions, been described in the British press as the brand's unofficial ambassador, a term she has never used herself.
What Chung represents for Acne Studios is harder to name than what Coppola or Nef brought, because it is less about a specific aesthetic contribution and more about durability. Chung's style — often described as 'effortless', a word that does no one any favours — is in fact highly considered. She wears Acne Studios jeans with the kind of consistency that suggests not loyalty but satisfaction. The Pistol boot, a low-heeled ankle boot with a stacked sole, has appeared on her feet in paparazzi shots across three continents and five years.
In 2017, Chung collaborated with the house on a small capsule collection, eight pieces that sold out within days. The collection was not groundbreaking. It was Acne Studios filtered through Chung's wardrobe: high-waisted jeans, a shrunken leather jacket, a striped cotton shirt with an oversized collar. What made it notable was the lack of fuss. No launch event, no multi-page spread in Vogue. The pieces appeared in-store and online, sold through, and were not restocked.
Johansson told Business of Fashion in 2018 that Chung "doesn't perform the clothes." He meant it as a compliment. Acne Studios has always been more interested in women who wear the garments as tools — for work, for movement, for getting through a day — than in women who wear them as statements.
What They Share
The through-line among these three women is not obvious at first glance. Coppola is a filmmaker. Nef is an actor and writer. Chung is a television presenter and, more recently, a designer herself. They do not share a generation, a geography, or a professional discipline. What they share is a way of inhabiting clothes without disappearing into them. They wear Acne Studios as if the garments were made for them, which in some cases they were, but also as if the garments were incidental to the larger project of their lives.
This is not a small thing. Fashion, particularly in the last decade, has leaned heavily on the idea of the muse as a kind of blank screen onto which a designer projects a vision. Acne Studios has worked differently. The women who have shaped the house are not screens. They are collaborators, sometimes paid and sometimes not, whose own clarity of vision has pushed the design team toward specificity.
One can argue that this approach has limits. Acne Studios remains a relatively small house, and its aesthetic — cool, cerebral, occasionally austere — does not translate easily across markets. But on balance, the choice to build a vocabulary around real women, rather than archetypes, has kept the work grounded.
The question now is whether that model holds as the house scales. Acne Studios was acquired by a Hong Kong-based investment firm in 2021, and while Johansson remains creative director, the pressures of growth are visible in the product line. More collaborations, more categories, more noise. Whether the next chapter includes women like Coppola, Nef, and Chung — women who shape the work rather than simply fronting it — remains to be seen.
For now, the grey wool coat from 2012 is still in the archive. One assumes it still fits.
