The fitting room on Norrmalmstorg is white
The fitting room on Norrmalmstorg is white. Not cream, not eggshell — the kind of white that registers as a dare. Jonny Johansson stands near the back wall, arms crossed, watching a model turn in a leather jacket cut so close to the body it might as well be a second skin. He says nothing for a long moment. Then: "Again." She turns. He nods. The jacket stays.
This is how Acne Studios has worked for two decades — quiet decisions, repeated until they feel inevitable. But the house didn't arrive at that precision alone. Three women, none of them models in the traditional sense, shaped what the Stockholm maison would become. They were not muses in the old mode — no Bettina Graziani perched on a settee, no Inès de la Fressange gliding down a runway in nautical stripes. They were collaborators, interpreters, occasionally obstacles. They brought their own lives into the frame, and Acne Studios bent around them.
The Stylist Who Stayed
Sofie Hallström joined Acne Studios in 2008, when the house was still half creative collective, half denim label. She'd worked at Bon magazine, knew the city's photographers and set designers, understood how to make a plain room look like a statement. Johansson hired her to style the lookbooks. She ended up staying for twelve years.
What Hallström brought was specificity. Acne Studios, in its early years, trafficked in a certain Scandi vagueness — clean lines, muted tones, the suggestion of good taste without much friction. Hallström pushed back. She mixed the house's minimalist tailoring with thrift-store finds, put a silk blouse under a puffer coat, styled sneakers with suiting before that became every brand's default. The lookbooks from 2010 to 2015 read less like product catalogues and more like documentary stills — women caught mid-thought, mid-stride, wearing clothes that seemed to have been pulled on in a hurry.
In a 2014 interview with AnOther, Johansson described her influence plainly: "Sofie doesn't care about making things pretty. She cares about making them true." That distinction mattered. Acne Studios was competing with Céline, The Row, Lemaire — houses where restraint had calcified into a kind of uniform. Hallström's styling suggested that minimalism could still surprise you.
She left in 2020, just before the pandemic collapsed the traditional fashion calendar. By then, her handwriting was already in the house codes: the oversized trench worn open, the way a scarf never quite matches, the studied carelessness that reads, on a second glance, as highly considered.
The Face, Twice Over
Guinevere van Seenus appeared in Acne Studios' Spring/Summer 2012 campaign and then again, six years later, for Pre-Fall 2018. Both times, she was shot by Daniel Jackson in natural light, no makeup, hair pulled back. The images are almost identical in mood — van Seenus staring just past the camera, expression unreadable, wearing a coat that could have been borrowed from someone else's closet.
Van Seenus was already well-known by 2012, a fixture in Vogue editorials and Jil Sander campaigns. But Acne Studios wasn't hiring her for glamour. They wanted her blankness, the way she could wear a garment without performing it. Johansson has said, in various interviews, that he prefers models who "don't try to sell you anything." Van Seenus, with her flat affect and angular frame, embodied that refusal.
What's notable is the repetition. Fashion campaigns typically cycle through faces — newness as a proxy for relevance. Acne Studios brought van Seenus back six years later, older, no less severe. The message was clear: we are not chasing youth. We are after something else.
That "something else" is harder to name. Durability, perhaps. A certain intellectual remove. The sense that the woman in the photograph has a life outside the frame, and that life does not revolve around what she's wearing. It's a fantasy, of course, but a useful one. Acne Studios built much of its identity on the idea that its customer is too busy — or too self-possessed — to care too much about fashion. Van Seenus, in those campaigns, made that idea visible.
The Artist Who Walked Away
Beca Lipscombe was never officially affiliated with Acne Studios, but her presence looms over the house's early-2010s aesthetic. A photographer and director based between London and Los Angeles, Lipscombe shot several of the brand's campaigns and lookbooks between 2011 and 2013. Her images were grainy, underexposed, often out of focus. Models appeared mid-gesture, caught in motion, as if the camera had interrupted something private.
Lipscombe's approach was the opposite of commercial polish. She used available light, shot on film, refused retouching. The results felt accidental, even though they were meticulously staged. In one memorable Spring/Summer 2013 image, a model sits on a curb in an oversized blazer, staring at her phone. The blazer is Acne Studios. The phone, the curb, the boredom — those belong to Lipscombe.
The collaboration ended abruptly in 2013. Lipscombe has never publicly discussed why, and Acne Studios moved on to other photographers. But her influence persisted. The house continued to favour naturalism over high production, casting non-models, shooting in unglamorous locations. The Lipscombe era established a visual language that Acne Studios still draws on: fashion as documentation, clothes as props in someone else's story.
Lipscombe herself shifted away from fashion work, focusing on personal projects and short films. In a rare 2016 interview with Dazed, she noted that commercial work "requires a kind of enthusiasm I don't always have." Fair enough. But for those three years, her lack of enthusiasm — or rather, her refusal to fake it — gave Acne Studios an edge it might not have found otherwise.
What Remains
Acne Studios has changed since those early years. The house is now part of a larger conglomerate, shows in Paris, operates boutiques in a dozen cities. Johansson remains creative director, but the scrappy collective energy has given way to something more polished, more predictable. The Spring/Summer 2024 collection featured the usual tailoring, the usual leather, the usual studied nonchalance. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing particularly surprising, either.
But the influence of Hallström, van Seenus, and Lipscombe is still legible. The house still casts faces that don't smile. The styling still leans toward the accidental. The campaigns still favour mood over message. These women didn't define Acne Studios in the way that Hubert de Givenchy defined Audrey Hepburn, or Yves Saint Laurent defined Catherine Deneuve. The relationship was more oblique, more collaborative. They offered a way of seeing, and the house took it.
Whether that vision endures is another question. Fashion moves quickly, and what felt radical in 2012 — a model staring blankly, a photograph slightly out of focus — now risks feeling like a mannerism. But for a moment, in a white fitting room in Stockholm, three women helped a young house figure out what it wanted to say. And for a while, at least, the world listened.
