When Jonny Johansson is at work, he sometimes finds himself thinking about the Vasa, a spectacularly appointed warship designed to transmit the magnificence and power of Sweden to a wider awestruck world. Unfortunately the Vasa sailed less than a mile in Stockholm harbour on her maiden voyage in 1628 before a gust of wind tipped her over. She sank.
Acne Studios, though, is no Vasa: it’s been sailing through fashion’s perilous waters for 30 years without ever going down. Johansson, however, seems prone to procatalepsis. He said: “I think about us sometimes when we go here [Paris]. I’m like, ‘are we going here like a ship trying to bleed out creativity?’”
This collection was entitled “Denim Hystoria,” and worked to enmesh Acne’s own history with a broader survey of the past. London’s New Romantics (with Adam Ant on the soundtrack) were the subcultural spark that ignited that collision. “I started pulling the basic idea of a pair of five-pocket jeans, 1996, first jeans, with a historic dress,” said Johansson. “That’s the tension I was going for.”
There were jaunty puffed skirts and open-backed peplums; smocked tops; tiny cropped caban jackets that exposed plenty of lower back; pink leather capri pants; cute, cropped breeches; and long trenches pulled together with double belts. Denim was manipulated into low-slung epauletted coats, strapped boots and Rococo-ish jeans bearing fragments of historical imagery. Some treated green denim came curled and strapped around the body, while crushed cutesy-floral leather and brocade trousers pushed the historical materiality further.
Cameo-like portrait brooches were pinned onto lapels; high boots with cuffed shafts came in blowsy, mumsy florals; satin shoes were ostentatiously ribboned and buckled. There was a buccaneering, musketeering air to some of it—rapier wit, stirring horns, jostling boots, “gadzooks”—helped along by the extract from “Prince Charming” in Frédéric Sanchez’s soundtrack. Rib-knit underwear, knickerbockers and argyle leggings created further fracas.
Some looks seemed purposefully overboard: a lot of elements competing for the same patch of deck. But the skirt-over-jean crux of it was a novel bit of rigging you could see translating into a high-velocity product for all-aboard Acne-philes.
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