By any objective measure at least, Acne Studios is on top. September will see the proudly independent Swedish fashion arthouse mark a decade on the Paris Fashion Week calendar. And it used the pandemic dynamically, making a multi-million euro investment to cook up a fresh retail concept for the grand store that opened with much fanfare earlier this week, at the very same Rue St Honoré space where Jonny Johannson once used to shop for Helmut Lang in the early aughts. Oh yes, and there was this collection too.
Johansson dialed into the showroom to describe a typically multi-faceted collection that had sprung, he said, from a very personal place: his wedding. “When we got married I had wanted to wear white. But I chickened out. I ended up wearing a black smoking with a wide lapel that seemed funky, but now, looking back, it probably wasn’t the best choice.” Thinking back on his own nuptials plus those of a few friends who’ve gotten hitched much more recently, Johansson started thinking about occasion wear. This led him to a collection that messed with the archetypes of special-event attire by imagining an Acne-fied cast of characters attending an imaginary wedding.
This correspondent’s instinct was that the designer’s own chosen wedding attire—if he could go back and do it all over again—was look 18’s bib shirt and short. On the day though, he would most likely chicken out and go for look 30’s undeniably funking low-hipped pink satin two piece suit. There was a satisfyingly bad boy studded minimal lederhosen-ish leather two-piece perfect for a badly behaved uncle. The woozily wispy distorted crochet knitwear seemed destined for a dangerously boozy auntie. And the linen suiting decorated with almost saccharine sweet bows by artist Karen Kilimnik was a dangerously overt signalling of sweet intentions ideal for any wedding party Romeo to hit the dancefloor in.
These fantasy characters aside, you could easily see customers not caring a jot about the inspiration behind the collection but being highly attracted to a suite of clothes that signaled the specialness of the context for which they’d been imagined, but which were also conduits of character and anything but uniform. Top stuff.
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