Jonny Johansson is a fashion alchemist. The creative director and co-founder of Acne Studios takes each season as an opportunity to recognise familiar ideas of clothing and put them on their head, making his show sort of a science fair of ideas that him and his team worked on in the past several months. This season, the class assignment was to take traditional garment archetypes, unexpectedly combine them and create covetable wardrobe hybrids. Think polo shirt reimagined as a long car coat or jeans cut as a blouson jacket, with a fly fastening and belt loops at the waist. Where you imagine Johansson’s experiments to become tricky, they do the opposite – the duffel coat/ blazer combo ends up looking like something completely familiar, like it came out of our dream wardrobe. When founding the brand in 1996, Johansson came up with the name as an acronym for “ambition to create novel expressions”. Now, over twenty years later, it’s more apparent than even before what exactly he meant with that. Playful, humorous and delightfully random – Acne Studios has all the novelty gifts we ever wanted.
