Was this the wrong door? As you walked into Acne Studios today you found yourself backstage. Nobody ushered you out, but just encouraged you down past the emptied rails and hanging look boards. There was the sound of applause beyond the stage wall. Wait, was this even a show—had it started?
“One, two, three, go!” said the headset-guy to the guest in front of you. Ahh! We were the models. Once past his counted prompt you turned a corner onto a raised catwalk with a line of Paris’s osteopathic tragedy circus chairs alongside, on which sat the models wearing Jonny Johansson’s Acne Studios collection. We watched them and they watched us, occasionally rising to applaud when the music faded out.
To be truly authentic, it was put to Johansson, the models should not have applauded us but instead taken desultory pictures on their phones and looked around for the door. “Ah! You’ve stolen the setup for the next season!” he replied.
The collection on the models was, he said, based on the idea of transitioning from a sweaty city to the Swedish summerhouse—the clapboard family-owned structures dotted around that country’s gorgeous archipelago of islets and islands. “I wanted a general mood of sensitivity, something romantic,” he added: “These are times that everybody is dressed in hoods—urban apocalyptic, like Mad Max—but for me it was important to show something beautiful, inspiring maybe, without being pretentious.”
Johansson’s signature oversize summer outerwear was cut in chiffon or linen in pale blue and deep red—shades named in Swedish falurod and dalabla respectively, the release said—and accompanied by matching superwide pants you couldn’t really see the drape of because the models were seated. Crochet tank tops and some narrower-cut outerwear and suiting came with naive stitching details derived, Johansson said, from typical mumsy Swedish cushions. The slingback sandals and slippers were especially nice, in fish scale–print leather or stiff fine-mesh crochet. As Johansson finished riffing on his summerhouse fantasy the models rose again and applauded: overkill, guys.
