“This season, we’ve created a powerful leather and denim woman,” says creative director Jonny Johansson
A wise man once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”. Though it was founded in 1996, it seems just yesterday that Acne Studios was primarily a denim and leather jacket brand (they started with 100 pairs of jeans, after all). Yesterday evening, creative director Jonny Johansson threw it back to these auspicious roots. “I’ve always been drawn to leather and denim. It’s the spirit of Acne Studios,” says Johansson, noting that one of the brand’s very first collections in the late '90s was called, quite simply, ‘Leather and Denim’. “This season, we’ve created a powerful leather and denim woman.” Aptly, he dubs the collection’s muse the “fast woman”.
Yet, Acne Studios today is a different beast – a full blown fashion house showing in Paris to a well-curated front row that included Willow Smith, Emily Ratajkowski and Johnny Suh. And then there are the clothes. For autumn/winter 24, Johansson doubled down on the sculptural elements of the previous collection. A leather dress takes on the female form, with structured hips and breasts (the notion of sculptured leather is mirrored in the sculptures in the show space – oversized chairs made from recycled car tires by Estonian artist Villu Jaanisoo). Cropped, knit turtlenecks include built-in bras. A white, ankle-sweeping tank dress offers a modern take on the hoop skirt.
Elsewhere, oil-coated and metallic denim offers a gritty take on that aforementioned first run of jeans. Also on deck, Acne Studios’ take on the mob wife: plush coats with massive collars fashioned from Icelandic sheepskin. Expect to see them on every Scandinavian It-girl come fall.
This is Acne Studios’ happy place: garments that are, for lack of a better description, cool as hell. “When you want to feel tough you gravitate towards leather and denim; it’s like armour. It always feels right,” says Johansson, who’s oft found wearing a beat up pair of jeans himself. “An empowering safety zone.”
See the full Acne Studios' AW24 collection below:
Acne Studios - AW24
