WHILE HE WAS WORKING ON Acne's spring 2013
collection—the long, floaty parachute-fabric skirts and T-shirts
emblazoned with the word "music" that are in stores now—Jonny Johansson
listened to a lot of Emmylou Harris. "It was a bit surreal. She talks
about women, the difference between a woman who has experience and a
woman who is young and free. She was painting pictures in a sense," he
says dreamily. "I could see this woman, in a white dress."
Johannson, the cofounder and designer of Acne Studios, is sharing this reverie in a lofty room
in the company's world headquarters, a spectacular art nouveau former
bank building on an almost ridiculously picturesque cobblestone street
in Stockholm's Old Town. Vintage copies of
Flair are enshrined
under plexiglass near the entrance; a grand staircase still shows off
its original gilded wood paneling and stained glass. The uniformly
youthful staff is clad in the kind of clothing that has become the
company's hallmark: edgy and slightly twisted, managing to walk a
tightrope between slightly avant-garde and eminently wearable—or, put
another way, unthreateningly bohemian
In an era when every high street from
Altoona to Zanzibar is crammed with identical chain stores selling
identical merchandise, Acne is perceived as different: Its legions of
fans think of it as a brand with integrity, a company that makes
principled aesthetic decisions and never resorts to marketing tricks, even though they have hundreds of outlets.
If
the most difficult challenge in the fashion industry is to remain
relevant and desirable in an ever more crowded marketplace—and the whole
project of predicting what customers will want in any given season is
at best an ephemeral enterprise—Acne's ability to play the game while
appearing to remain mysteriously above the fray is a deeply impressive
accomplishment. The company was founded in 1996 by four guys who threw
10,000 euros into a pot and launched a multidisciplinary digital
film–design–creative consulting collective in Stockholm, an enterprise
that, by a combination of frankly nutty decisions and shrewd business
practices, has become a highly profitable business—$112 million in
revenue last year alone—encompassing men's and women's ready to wear,
footwear, accessories and premium denim.
Johansson,
who turns 44 this month, originally came to Stockholm from a small town
in Sweden to be a rock musician. "I sacrificed my band for this!" he
says, smiling. He has no formal training as a designer, and his
interests range far beyond the usual fashion talk—the conversation
drifts easily from jazz artist Chet Baker to the turn–of–the–20th
century Swedish polymath August Strindberg. Struggling to describe in
words how he works, he uses his first love as a metaphor: "When you get
into the flow, music connects with the unconscious. Fashion does this
too, but it's more playful, like perfume. And it's very fast."
In
its early days, Acne Studios strove for a Warhol Factory atmosphere.
"We loved how they looked, the way they did things—whether you were old
or young didn't matter," Johansson says. The business's
borderline-repulsive name—an acronym for Ambition to Create Novel
Expression—was meant to be deliberately off-putting, a reflection of the
ironic mood of the '90s. "I didn't like the name at all," he confesses.
"I was embarrassed to call the bank. I don't know if I like it now
either."
