“I’ve always enjoyed the idea that an infinite forest is just around the corner," says creative director Jonny Johansson on the season's Swedish woodland inspiration
It’s no great secret that Scandinavians love nature and for autumn/winter 2023, Acne Studios creative director Jonny Johansson looked beyond his Stockholm surrounds to the great outdoors. The forest, specifically. “Sweden is the kind of place where the city ends abruptly and then the pine forest begins,” he says. “I’ve always enjoyed the contrast between urban life and nature, the idea that an infinite forest is just around the corner.”
A fantastical forest, its trees fashioned from natural rope and dripping with crystals, serves as the backdrop for a collection well suited to an especially hip forest rave. Sturdy leather is painted to mimic tree bark or mud splatter. “There’s a kind of brutality to nature in winter, and I wanted that to come across in the treatment of the fabrics,” Johansson notes. Elsewhere, deconstructed gowns of hairy yarn seem to grow like moss over the body. The unpredictability of the natural world is mimicked in raw edges, distressing and the purposefully haphazard way the garments hang from the models. “I wanted everything to have a crafty, homemade feel,” Johansson says.
But the most literal interpretation of the forest – and the designer’s personal favourite – comes via garments constructed of delicate cut-out leaves. “They’re, for me, the coolest looks because they’re the most conceptual,” Johansson says. A modern day Eve, unapologetically sexy, ready to emerge from the forest and onto the streets.
See the full collection below:
Acne Studios - AW23
