The Swedes Who Dared to Stand Out

Jonny Johansson doesn’t like to talk about himself. But if forced to answer questions, Johansson, the creative director of Acne Studios, is at least honest. “Why I do it?” he asks himself. “I think because I just want to be loved by people that say, ‘Oh, that guy does something really special.’” He was sitting on a sofa in a hotel room on the Lower East Side in early June, the buoyant sound of the New York Knicks victory parade in the distance a contrast to his reserved, reflective mood on the occasion of Acne’s 30th anniversary.

It’s rare that Johansson comes to New York. He hates to fly. But if he has to, it’s to Costa Rica or Encinitas to surf. Japan is big for Acne’s business. But in New York, Johansson was required on set for Acne’s special denim campaign with the photographer Nan Goldin and a cast of artists and actors, including Juliette Lewis, Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Peter Schlesinger. They modeled Acne’s new denim capsule based on the original raw denim jeans with red thread that Johansson designed 30 years ago. He distributed them to his up-and-comer friends in Stockholm’s young creative scene. It was the old-fashioned way of going viral.

“I made a pair of jeans once, and it took on its own life,” Johansson said.

Acne Studios is now a global brand on track to hit $500 million in sales next year. Its signature chalky salmon pink, introduced in 2007 on its shopping bags and packaging, was an antecedent to the “millennial pink” color craze. It has 79 stores and counting. In August a minimalist gallery-like space with pink granite used throughout, opened across from the Whitney Museum of Art in the Meatpacking District in New York, replacing the smaller store that had been on Horatio Street in the West Village.

The company began in 1996, when Johansson and a cohort of scrappy young Swedes on a quest for a creative livelihood formed a collective in Stockholm and slapped an ironic blemish of a name on it. First, ACNE stood for Associated Computer Nerd Enterprises, then Ambition to Create Novel Expressions. They had ambitions of making furniture, music and film.

At the time Swedish fashion was a novelty on the international scene. H&M didn’t come to the United States until 2000. “Acne is the progenitor of Scandinavian fashion as actual fashion,” said Josh Peskowitz, a men’s wear creative and retail consultant. “In the early 2000s, it was the next jean. Diesel was falling off at that point, and cool people in New York were wearing Acne jeans.” Designed with clean lines and devoid of overt branding, Acne’s skinny silhouettes mopped the sales floor with the flares and boot cuts with bedazzled pockets. The company was off to the races.

Johansson, who possessed no fashion design training, didn’t want to be a denim brand — too narrow, too basic. His vision of fashion as a vehicle for more was shaped by his experience in music. Before establishing Acne, Johansson was in a series of bands, always wearing black or white leather pants, a T-shirt and dyed hair. He wasn’t a great guitarist, but he could play well enough, sing and write songs.

“You have something you want to say with the music, to express with your clothes,” he said. “You want to do really pretty posters. You want to do stage things.”

Mattias Magnusson, Acne’s chief executive, joined the company 22 years ago, straight out of college. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Sweden,” Magnusson said, “but we are essentially taught from infancy not to stand out from a crowd.” He grew up in Almhult, the hometown of Ikea, where everyone in the village had a connection to the company. His parents worked for Ikea, and after a few summers on the job himself, he spent the rest of his youth trying to escape the democratic design giant’s grips.

Magnusson was so eager to be part of Acne’s energy that he offered to work for free under the company’s two guiding principles. “One was uncompromised creativity, and one was multidisciplinary creativity,” he said. A third de facto tenet was no business people. Acne amended that when it realized that creative freedom was easier on a solid financial foundation. Also, Magnusson has long blond hair and looks anything but corporate.

Acne Studios is still technically independent — Johansson and Mikael Schiller, the executive chairman, together own the majority of the company. In 2019, the investment firm IDG Capital and the Hong Kong-based I.T. Group took significant stakes. Remaining outside of fashion’s luxury conglomerate systems, the LVMH, Kering, Richemont and Puig’s of the world, is a badge of honor even if Acne is no longer “indie.”

In 2005, Acne published its own magazine, Acne Paper, as a highbrow cultural dragnet for whatever it thought was cool even if it had nothing to do with the brand. Thomas Persson was the editor until 2014, releasing 15 issues, each dedicated to a single theme. A heady anniversary edition, titled Autoportrait, was released earlier this summer.

“In the beginning it was like, ‘Oh, it’s a brand magazine, like a magalogue or whatever,’” Persson said. “It took a while to prove ourselves.” In 2006, Persson had a friend slip a handwritten letter through Lord Snowdon’s mail slot, asking if he would like to shoot portraits of students and teachers at Central Saint Martins in London for an issue devoted to education. It turned out he would be delighted.

“I remember thinking, ‘What are we going to serve him for lunch on set?’” Persson said. “His assistant said, ‘A chicken sandwich, and you have to have white wine.’” I said, ‘But what sort of wine?’ ‘Doesn’t matter as long as it’s white.’” Persson was terrified. Snowdon was charmed.

When Acne held its first runway show during London Fashion Week in 2010, it was at Snowdon’s former apartment at Kensington Palace. It produced its first monograph, “Snowdon Blue,” with an accompanying capsule of blue shirts. Acne Paper went on to draw blue chip creative collaborators across fashion, art and film, including Paolo Roversi, Viviane Sassen and Vince Aletti. All of them were lured by the company’s laissez faire attitude and high-level execution.

By 2013, Acne Studios was staging men’s and women’s runway shows during Paris Fashion Week, taking big swings away from art director-y minimalism in favor of art director-y eccentricity, with extreme styling and strange proportions.

“At a certain point, their clothes got extra-weird,” Peskowitz said.

The recent runway collections have been tinged with anniversary nostalgia. The women’s fall 2026 collection featured subversions of bourgeois twin sets and voluminous tweed skirts worn by Johansson’s piano teacher. The men’s spring 2027 collection, with its stovepipe jeans in red and white and exaggerated Cuban-heel boots, felt like a caricature of the retro rock ‘n’ roll and creative agency type that Johansson used to be.

By comparison, the neat raw denim and distressed five-pocket styles featured in Goldin’s campaign are a refreshing return to Acne’s roots.

“We tried to run away from it,” Johansson said. “But we don’t have to be a denim brand just because we’re doing great denim.”