"I never felt comfortable with the name,” Jonny Johansson says. We’re in
Stockholm, lunching on a local delicacy, pickled herring, and discussing
quite how what began as a four-man creative collective in 1996 has blossomed
into a family of creative companies, with successful advertising, film and
digital divisions, a beautiful and brainy style magazine, and most notably,
a jeans and fashion label that lately seems to have become the last word in
European cool. And all this under the unlikely moniker of Acne, which stands
for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions, but which signifies spottiness in
Swedish just as it does in English. A difficult name to live with, for sure,
but not one we’re likely to forget. “And, of course, now it’s too late to
change it,” Johansson says with a wry smile.
If Acne is an unlikely label to appear on highly desirable jeans, then
Johansson is also an unlikely fashion genius. He has never trained in
fashion, starting out as a front man in a couple of bands (“a diva”, he
admits, his showman qualities coming to the fore when his portrait comes to
be taken), before co-founding the Acne collective. And he’s jolly, which
can’t be said of many fashion designers. And somehow that jolliness shows in
the clothes, with a playful modernism that has made Acne the Helmut Lang de
nos jours – a clear winner in the keenly competitive denim wars, as worn by
the likes of Chloë Sevigny, Sofia Coppola and Alexa Chung. Last year
Johansson upped the ante with a limelight-stealing collaboration with
fashion industry favourite, Lanvin.
The man behind Acne’s campaign for global domination comes from Umea, an
eight-hour drive north from Stockholm. Up there the nights are even brighter
in the summer (“When you cycle home at 2am and it’s still bright you feel
high”), but longer, darker, and yet more depressing in the winter (“when you
feel the pressure of all this darkness”). And the local delicacy isn’t the
delicious pickled herring we’re lunching on in Stockholm, but soured
herring. “Basically it’s completely rotten,” he explains with a grin, “and
it stinks, so you take it outside to open the can – and you smell it right
down the street if your neighbours are eating it.” It all sounds a long way
from Milan and Paris. But the clothing line launched almost by accident when
Acne Creative made 100 pairs of jeans to give away (now collectors’ items)
today has a turnover of €38 million (£32.7 million).
The word “collective” doesn’t normally go hand in hand with commercial
success. But the inspiration for the four founding members of Acne
Collective was Andy Warhol’s Factory, which was a commercial force as well
as a creative one – a concept that “liberated” Johansson, he explains, to
aim to make money as well as beautiful things. In the early years, that
meant the founders turning their hands to record sleeve and interior design,
shooting ads, developing a brand identity for Swedish fashion house J.
Lindeberg – in short, anything that would help keep the collective afloat.
Johansson wanted everything in the Acne offices to be made by Acne, which
sounds quixotic, but a table designed by Johansson attracted the attention
of one of life’s great early adopters, Tyler Brûlé, who promptly ran a piece
about Acne (“probably slightly too early for us,” Johansson jokes) in his
Wallpaper* magazine, and Acne’s international reputation was launched.
If the A in Acne stands for ambition, that certainly characterises the way the
collective of four has grown into a family of successful, independent
companies – companies that have been known to bail each other out when
they’ve run into financial difficulties, which the fashion side did at one
point, when Johansson got too ambitious for his own good and made too many
jeans in one early season. But there’s still a kind of interdependent,
social democratic quality in evidence within the Acne family – very Swedish.
“We sometimes get into trouble when we deal with American or British
companies, because as Swedes we tend to work very collaboratively and to
ignore the hierarchies,” admits Max Ahlbom, co-ordinator on Acne Digital.
That thought is echoed by Johansson, who with a generosity also seldom found
in fashion, attributes his own success as a designer to the fact that “I
like to work with people who are better than me”: people like Frida Bard, in
charge of womenswear, and Christoffer Lundmann, head of menswear design.
The Acne family has grown considerably. But most of its 100 employees are
still housed under one roof – in the former Wallenberg building, part bank,
part grand family house, in Stockholm’s drop-dead-gorgeous Old Town. (The
flagship store is housed in another former bank – the site of the hostage
situation that gave rise to the term “Stockholm syndrome”.) The offices are
full of cool-looking, often strikingly beautiful young people working with a
smile and sense of purpose, like so many fashionably, casually clad Norse
gods and goddesses (for there’s nothing mythical about the renowned good
looks of the Swedes).
They might party together occasionally, or compare notes while they eat lunch
in the kitchen, and beyond that, there’s sometimes useful synergies to be
found. A family of companies that includes an ad agency, film and digital
divisions (the latter also sharing an American office in LA) is clearly well
placed for the opportunities of the digital age. Elsewhere retail worlds
collide, with quirky teddy bears made by co-founder Mats Johansson (no
relation) sold alongside Jonny Johansson’s fashion.
If you were young and bright and Swedish, you’d probably want to work at Acne,
in this atmosphere of playful industry – perhaps commuting by boat from your
house in the archipelago, as does Mikael Schiller, a former psychology
teacher who became the fashion house’s CEO at the tender age of 25.
(Mikael’s brother Max set up Acne’s Parisian showroom and store at the even
more tender age of 21.) There’s a mood of optimism throughout the place, of
collective endeavour among the companies which Mikael likens to “brothers
and sisters, with strong emotional ties but lives of their own”.
Stockholm feels like it’s also on a high right now. It has emerged as an
unexpected hothouse of fashion talent, from jeans brands Hope, Nudie and
Whyred to the global fast-fashion giant H&M. Sweden also seems slightly
cushioned from the world’s current woes, and Acne certainly has good cause
to be upbeat, with the fashion house’s year-on-year sales up by 25 per cent.
Washing down our Swedish herring with French sancerre, we mull over Sweden’s
relationship with the wider world. “Swedes can seem slightly lost,
somehow,” says Jonny Johansson, before jokingly paraphrasing an oft-used
line about the number of young Swedes in London, that “the fourth largest
Swedish city is actually Shoreditch”. And then we talk about how Acne has
become a fashion house with a global following – and also super-connected.
Think Lanvin, for example, or the big-name contributors to Acne Paper, that
brainy style mag, such as Mario Testino and Carine Roitfeld.
And yet Acne somehow seems semi-detached from the world of fashion: for
example, while the next Acne collection will show in London in a few weeks’
time, that won’t be during London Fashion Week. And similarly the label –
which couldn’t be more now – somehow does what it does without aiming to be
completely in synch with what’s happening in the fashion capitals of London,
New York, Paris and Milan.
“I’ll pick up an idea somewhere,” Johansson agrees, “which isn’t necessarily
what’s going on right now...” And then he’ll run with it, only with a degree
of confidence that might have astounded him a few years back, and develop it
with his team in Stockholm. And doubtless, in a little while, some of us
elsewhere in the world will be wearing it – and sporting our Acne with
pride, so to speak. I put it to him that it’s like that liberating moment
when you’re growing up and you stop trying to be like the popular kids in
school, and you just do your own thing, and lo and behold, people like it.
“Exactly!” he says with an infectious laugh, a man absolutely at
the top of his game.
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