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“My advice to people who want to have companies that do what we do is this: control is the only thing that is crucial.” Jonny Johansson, founder and creative director of Acne Studios, is speaking before tomorrow’s showroom presentation for its Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection. That collection will be the first manifestation in product of Acne’s 30th-anniversary year: in a very different form to its current incarnation, the brand was created back in 1996, when Johansson was just 25.
The anniversary is not yet front of mind for Johansson. For now, he’s engaged with more imminent demands on his creative control of a company that in 2024 estimated its revenues at between €300 million and €350 million. As well as the new collection, this Paris menswear week will see Acne Studios open a “sort of gallery” in the Palais Royal space that became its first-ever Paris store back in 2008.
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The gallery will be a conceptual extension of Acne Paper, the well-regarded biannual magazine the brand founded in 2004 under the editorship of Thomas Persson. The title, in print until 2014, was revived in 2021 as a book, and has since returned to annual publication. Says Johansson of the new space: “It’s a place for the collaborators of Acne Paper to show themselves, and maybe start some new creative adventures. They should think about it as a new kind of blank page, with no gallery pressure.”
Palais Royal closed as a store a few months ago in order to make room for the new gallery. Its operations have been folded into those of Acne Studios’s two more recently opened Paris stores: one on Rue Saint-Honoré, the other on Rue Froissart in Le Marais. But Palais Royal remains an emblematic address for the brand.
Johansson recalls that when he first saw it back in 2007 or so, “I was in love, completely mesmerised.” However, Mikael Schiller, Acne Studios’s executive chair and Johansson’s co-owner of a 59 per cent majority stake in the brand, harboured reservations. “It was expensive. I remember we argued in the taxi afterwards about whether it was a good idea. But we had just had our first big interview in Vogue — that was one of the pieces in the puzzle that made us think bigger,” Johansson remembers. After robust discussions, he and Schiller decided to roll the dice on Palais Royal, “because Paris was the first real international stage we were trying to enter. We were also trying to grow up, in a way.”
Schiller joined Acne in the early 2000s, which makes Johansson the only original member of a brand for which, at the start, fashion was merely an afterthought. As Johansson recalls, it was something he fell into almost by chance. He was born in Ronneby, Sweden, in 1969 and raised in the town of Umeå, where he was thwarted on the cusp of achieving his first ambition to be a rock star. “I played guitar and sang. When I was about 19, my band was picked to represent Sweden in this competition sponsored by Yamaha, and we got to travel to Tokyo to play in Budokan,” he tells me. Later, the band was signed to CBS: while recording their first album, says Johansson, his bandmates kicked him out of the line-up.
While the band never really got anywhere, his rejection from it was a blow. Licking his wounds, Johansson moved to Stockholm in search of success — “I wanted to get revenge” — and began work in a clothing store. One day, he was spotted by promoter Balthazar Silveira, who thought Johansson looked cool, and invited him to his club in the city. It was there he first encountered some of the other core personnel — Mats Johansson, Jesper Kouthoofd and Tomas Skoging — with whom he would found ACNE, in its original all-caps form. This was 1996.
The original ACNE was a sort of agency-cum-multidiscipliary creative collective. The name was an acronym for ‘Associated Computer Nerd Enterprises’. “Everybody was sitting behind a computer; it was 1996. They wanted to be on top of fashion, and they asked me to be on top of that because they thought I was fashionable. We did consultancies, for H&M, and a golf brand. I did showrooms, shoots, record sleeves. They almost sacked me at one point because they were putting so much money into my fashion thing and it was contributing so little. Luckily, I had some money in the bank, and they asked me if I would like to invest,” Johansson recalls.
This was the point at which ACNE stumbled onto the path that would define its destiny. Johansson created 100 pairs of red-stitched jeans as a sort of organic marketing hustle: the idea was to give them away to friends and family. The Italian factory he first approached declined such a tiny order, so Johansson went local. “Those first pairs were made in Sweden. One pocket was lower than the other because they did not have the denim machines,” he reveals. And yet, the jeans caught the attention of French Vogue, which featured them. “We had one of the guys from Devo wearing our jeans which we thought was so cool, and Iggy Pop, too.”
One day, editor Tyler Brûlé passed the first-floor ACNE office-slash-store in Stockholm, and asked his assistant to ring the bell and ask what was going on. “We had this idea that everything should be touched by us, drawn by us, made by us. So we got a big spread in Wallpaper*, which was significant also,” tells Johansson.
Johansson characterises these early years of fashion experimentation as a tightrope walk. He says: “It was a mix of having really high confidence based on thoughts of being amazing, and then really dark moments of realising your limitations. The progress was kind of quick in the start, and that was kind of the worst bit. We had no idea how to produce after doing those first jeans, and people were very, very interested in what we did.” But Johansson and his collaborators worked it out.
By the early 2000s, the original ragtag structure of the collective was beginning to fray. “We had five or six companies. One guy was making synthesizers, one was an illustrator, the other was working in advertising, we had a film company making music videos… and then Mikael came in and launched the idea of focusing on this fashion thing. And I thought, hell yeah — but how are we going to do it?” As Johansson recalls, he and Schiller secured a bank loan, thanks to a connection of Schiller’s, which allowed them to buy out the brand. They then took enough investment, for around 20 per cent at first, to allow them to retain majority control of what at this point became Acne Studios, pay-off the loan, and retain some funds to play with. The brand’s acronym was changed to ‘Ambition to Create Novel Expression’, and its focus shifted almost exclusively — Acne Paper apart — to expanding its fashion identity.
The first few years were psychologically challenging. “You walk around worried somebody is going to tell you that you are a complete fake. That they are going to tap you on the shoulder and say that you should pursue another career. We had that low confidence at that point,” Johansson explains. The pair prevailed, and steadily grew both the business and the reputation of the brand as an avant garde and contemporary alternative to mainstream labels.
The same year that the Paris store opened, Johansson presented Acne Studio’s first fashion show at London Fashion Week, “because Stockholm was not an international arena when it came to press”. Then, an invitation to create an exhibition at the Palais Galliera in 2013 gave them the opportunity to be accepted onto the Paris schedule: “The BFC [British Fashion Council] was disappointed, I guess.” The resulting show and collection incorporated scans made by artist and photographer Katerina Jebb of Marie Antoinette’s dress and Napoleon Bonaparte’s jacket, which were superimposed over Johansson’s garments. “I was thinking about not having a history in fashion itself, and wondering if there is any way I could absorb a fashion soul from this new context,” he says.
Today, Acne Studios continues to navigate the line between niche and mainstream with idiosyncratic assurance. A further financial restructuring saw its original outside investors exit in 2018, and Johansson and Schiller’s holding slimmed down to that still authoritative 59 per cent. It is here that Johansson delivers his line about the importance of control.
A few years ago, says Johansson, he became disillusioned and came very close to stepping back from having day-to-day creative oversight of the brand. “I was sitting in all these meetings where I was very far from making these designs myself,” he recalls. “I got more and more depressed about it. I thought I was going to quit. I just needed to find the right time. I went on with this until I was halfway out. And then realised it was everything I love to do.”
Today, Johansson focuses as much (if not more) on design as he does on management. “For me, the thing I enjoy the most is working with my colleagues closely and seeing sometimes that I impress them,” he explains. “When those things happen, I can walk home on a cloud. You need to sacrifice a hell of a lot to be really good.”
The collection we will see in Paris on Wednesday is, Johansson says, inflected by the country he first visited as an aspiring rock star: Japan. This July, Acne Studios will open another store, next to Prada, in Tokyo’s Aoyama district. He says the newly constructed building, designed by Christian and Ruxandra Halleroed, “looks almost naked — it is very Swedish in that way”. As for the collection, he adds: “That connection with Japan has been looming large in my mind. The collection incorporates our text translated into Japanese, and there are various other bits and bobs that make me think about Japan — but you will have to wait and see when we meet at the presentation.”
As our chat winds down, Johansson observes: “What’s very forgiving with fashion is that it is something playful but still at the same time real — it’s an industry, not just an artform. And all those aspects probably fit me pretty well. I dreamed of being a musician during my whole upbringing, but I’m glad I didn’t end up in a rock band that just grew old. My genes are not Mick Jagger’s.”
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