Denim and leather are the meat and drink upon which Acne Studios has sustained itself and flourished since its late 1990s founding. Backstage today Jonny Johansson confessed that over the years he has sometimes hungered for other design outlets—“I was like: ‘I need something else. I need it!’”—which is how tailoring, knitwear, accessories and all the other categories Acne covers have entered its lexicon. Denim and leather, however, remain the source.
Today Johansson returned to them as the foundations of a collection through which he built out a much broader Acne edifice. It was informed and inspired by two works, named Chairs in Rubber, by the Estonian artist Villu Jaanisoo: these were made from recycled tires sliced into strips and then fashioned into beyond human-size, vaguely sinister thrones. Some guests were seated in the middle of the runway on smaller reconstructions of them. Johansson said that Jaanisoo’s “mechanical treatment” of objects designed to envelop the human form had accelerated the approach to the clothes we saw tonight.
Denim, the first of Acne’s twin poles, was rendered by spray or soaking to variously carry a rusty, oily or metallic surface sheen. Thus mechanized it was cut into high collared truckers, jeans, full-length trucker-shirt dresses, or strapless dresses. These treatments were echoed in the matte, paint-like coating applied to thick rib knit dresses.
Leather was delivered in two main ways. Broadly ruched bodies and dresses in smoothly finished, supple hides meant to recall saddlery were contoured with wide zippers meant to echo those of a handbag. This was part of a broader story that saw bag straps accent shoes, and padlocks used as earrings, shoe hardware, and in gunmetal necklaces: a cross-category mash-up designed to question where one began and the other ended.
The second leather story came via three dresses that were as stiffly rigid as the zippered pieces were soft and yielding. These had been shaped through repeated wetting to hold their form, which was pre-molded to fit around the bodies of their wearers. Their sculptural aspect was further reflected in the colored printed dresses that featured a sculpture of a renaissance winged cherub.
Further elements in Johansson’s fit-out included heavy, high-volume coats in Icelandic shearling and further versions in faux furs. Skin-tight short-legged bodysuits (also zippered) and layered and light ribbed-knit base layers were racy in a vaguely automotive sense. Conversely, two dresses whose bodicing flared at the hip to allow the skirts to fall widely from them, and some looks in a tailoring check, were more stately. “Sometimes you really want to crash things,” Johansson observed. His collection of curated collisions did just that.
