Acne Studios

Acne Studios

Type	Private
Industry	Fashion
Founded	1997
Founder	Jonny Johansson
Headquarters	Stockholm, Sweden
Key people	Jonny Johansson, creative director Mikael Schiller, executive chairman Mattias Magnusson, CEO
Website	www.acnestudios.com

Acne Studios is a multidisciplinary luxury fashion house based in Stockholm, Sweden with own-brand retail stores in locations around the world.^[1] It was founded in 1996 as part of the creative collective ACNE.^[2] The fashion house offers men's and women's ready-to-wear fashion, footwear, accessories and denim, as well as special artistic collaborations and one-off projects.^[3]^[4]^[5]

Background

Acne Studios was founded in 1996 in Stockholm, Sweden as part of the creative collective ACNE that focused on graphic design, film, production and advertising.^[6] The name ACNE stands for "Ambition to Create Novel Expressions". In 1997, cofounder Jonny Johansson created one hundred pairs of raw denim jeans with red stitching and gave them away to friends and family. Wallpaper and Vogue Paris quickly picked up on the popularity of the jeans and Acne Studios rapidly expanded their fashion offering outside of denim. In 2006, Acne Studios became a standalone company and separated from Acne Film, Acne Advertising and Acne Digital, at the same time launching their ecommerce website acnestudios.com. Since launch, Acne Studios has grown into a global fashion house with retail stores around the world including Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, Antwerp and Tokyo, offering women's and men's ready-to-wear collections, showing at Paris Fashion Week twice a year and turning over $120 million annually in 2013.^[7]

Products

Acne Studios design men's and women's ready-to-wear fashion, footwear, accessories and denim.

The main women's Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter collections are presented twice a year at Paris Fashion Week. The women's Resort and Pre-Fall collections are presented in New York and men's main collections are presented twice a year in Paris.

According to the Acne Studios environmental strategy the company wants to produce wares that are high quality and that has long life. Their goal in 2012 was to increase the amount of environmentally preferable materials and adds that their goal for 2014 is that 20 percent of all fabrics used in their "never-out-of-stock" products should be made of organic cotton or some similar environmentally stable material.

Acne Paper

Acne Studios avoids traditional forms of marketing and advertising, choosing instead to publish a biannual magazine called Acne Paper.^[8]^[9] Acne Paper covers the disciplines of art, fashion, photography, design, architecture, academia, and culture. Each issue is based around a theme that is interpreted by selected contributors from their field of expertise. Contributors to Acne Paper have included Carine Roitfeld, Noam Chomsky, David Lynch, Lord Snowdon, Azzedine Alaïa, Mario Testino, Sarah Moon, Tilda Swinton and Paolo Roversi.

Stores

Acne Studios has own-brand stores in locations around the world including Stockholm, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Antwerp, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, Hong Kong and Tokyo.^[10] Acne Studios' Stockholm flagship store on Norrmalmstorg was the location of the 1973 bank robbery and subsequent hostage situation that gave rise to the term Stockholm Syndrome for the psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors.

Collaborations

Acne Studios has collaborated widely with representatives from the creative industries to produce limited edition collections.^[11] Some examples include a range of bikes with the world’s oldest bike manufacturer Bianchi Bicycles,^[12] a furniture line of sofas based on Swedish designer Carl Malmsten’s sofa Nya Berlin,^[13]^[14] a capsule collection with couture house Lanvin,^[15] an art installation and a collection with artist Katerina Jebb,^[16] a cross-gender blouse collection with transsexual magazine Candy,^[17] an art book and blue shirt line with Lord Snowdon,^[18] limited edition prints with William Wegman,^[19] a rodeo-themed book and capsule collection inspired by Bruce of Los Angeles,^[20] a collection based around artworks by abstract Swedish pioneer Hilma af Klint,^[21] and a capsule collection with Liberty London.^[22]