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Acne Studios

Fall 2023 RTW

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Properties

Date: March 2, 2023
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 51
Brand: Acne Studios
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Joelle Diderich for WWD

Given the state of the world today, who can blame Jonny Johansson for wanting to escape into nature?

Acne’s creative director tapped set designer Shona Heath to transform his show venue in Paris into a twisted fantasy forest, complete with glinting black gravel, poison ivy and giant crochet and cellophane plants — think Venus flytraps on acid.

Back in 2020, Johansson was among the first to embrace the potential of AI-generated fashion design. Now he’s espousing the natural world, which in Sweden is always lurking around the corner.

“I felt that there’s been a lot of fashion inspired by technology and all these tech things, so I just wanted to do something else,” he said backstage. “I’m a little bit bored with all this technology.”

It made for a craft-intensive collection, with looks ranging from woodland-fairy slipdresses patchworked together from crinkled fabric leaves, to oversize suits and coats that looked like they were dug from the undergrowth.

Laced leather leggings were painted to resemble tree bark or cracked earth, while felted fabrics mimicked the texture of moss. Sturdy protective layers, fit for Sweden’s endless winter, contrasted with wispy gowns in brightly colored velvet dévoré, or shredded knit dresses dotted with crochet flowers.

There was a hallucinatory quality to these pagan ravers, accentuated by a model whose torso was painted with an elaborate landscape. Office-friendly, it wasn’t. But that was precisely the point.

By Chioma Nnadi for Vogue

With crystal strands dripping from twisted tree trunks and psychedelic crochet flowers in full bloom, the stage was set for an enchanted forest at Acne Studios tonight. For creative director Jonny Johansson, the fantastical reference was rooted in memories of his childhood growing up in northern Sweden, where the backyard was, as he put it, “infinite woods.” Now a longtime resident of Stockholm, Johansson has built the Scandi brand on a decidedly urban aesthetic, one that first leaned into hardworking denim and cool outerwear. The new collection was presented as a nostalgic exploration of the natural world through a city dweller’s lens.

Models stomped out like bleary-eyed wood nymphs on their way to some all-night rave, decked out in skinny lace-up leather pants and cropped moto jackets that were painted to look like flaky white birch trees and moss green crochet slip dresses studded with flowers that gently unraveled on the bias. Johansson described the distressed look and handwork of the clothes as a rejection of the hyperreal look of digital fashion that has swept social media in the last few years. Perhaps in theory at least, the clothes were conceived of as an antidote to an overstimulated, highly technological way of being—the sartorial equivalent of the digital detox we’ve all desperately been craving.

In practice, that destroyed look had an apocalyptic bent that verged on the threadbare in places. It would be tough to imagine some of the barely-there devoré-and-silk-chiffon leaf dresses finding a place in the real world. The wrapped and draped herringbone wool coats and crinkled oversized blazers, on the other hand, had a practical swagger that was more tangible. That down-to-earth feeling was in line with the mood of the season and seems most likely to hold sway on the street come fall.