Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s Acne Studios takeover is one Frieze Week installation you won’t want to miss

When Acne Studios approached Jonathan Lyndon Chase to design an installation for its S/S 2025 runway presentation in Paris, it was the first time the Philadelphia-based artist had ever collaborated with a fashion brand. In fact, Lyndon Chase – despite their proclivity for flowing skirts and acrylic nails – had to Google the Swedish label’s name.

‘I was looking at the vibe, the colour, the textures and attitude of what Acne Studios is really passionate about,’ they tell Wallpaper*. The result was a raucous living room scene, anchored by painted furniture, punctuated by soft, figurative cloth sculptures, and loaded with meaning.

‘I'm really interested in a full spectrum of sensation and emotion,’ they explain. ‘[My work] is about my lived experience as a queer, Black person.’

So fruitful was the collaboration that Acne Studios and Lyndon Chase have returned for more. This week, the artist has fully taken over the brand’s SoHo flagship in New York City – just in time for Frieze Week.

Interspersed throughout the boutique are some 60 sculptures, furnishings and paintings created by Lyndon Chase in their warehouse studio in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighbourhood. Each work sprang from ‘memories growing up, friends, family, my relationship with my husband, past lovers’, Lyndon Chase explains, as well as their hometown of Philly.

Take a voluptuous, human-scale figure, made from a muslin form stuffed with polyester fiberfill, that greets visitors near the store’s Grand Street entrance. ‘It kind of looks like me,’ says Lyndon Chase, but it’s also, ‘someone you could project yourself onto.’

There’s a stuffed cat, complete with a bow and blue eyes; soft busts bedazzled with jewels and hoop earrings; and vintage furniture scrawled with doodles and messages. A crouching mixed-media figure forms the base of a coffee table (a new material experiment in Lyndon Chase’s practice). Even the store’s point-of-sale got a Lyndon Chase makeover of bows, figures and faces.

The work is at once tender and profane; intimate and universal – intentional tensions the artist explores in their work. ‘It's really about humanity and the human condition and taking ownership of your body and love and sexuality,’ Lyndon Chase says. ‘It’s super-important right now to live unapologetically.’

References to the Acne Studios collection are close at hand, too. Lyndon Chase was inspired by the label’s offbeat approach to denim, and designed stuffed sculptures to suit, including hanging, heart-shaped pillows that gleefully evoke floating buttocks. Lyndon Chase was also invited to team up with the brand on a special capsule collection of trousers, T-shirts, a pillow and a blanket. ‘This is an extension of what we did [in Paris],’ the artist explains, ‘this kind of homebody-centred situation.’

Indeed it’s everything that goes on under a single roof that intrigues Chase the most: ‘the ups, the downs, the lows, the friendly, the slutty, the romantic – all of it.’

Catch Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s installation at Acne Studios Greene Street from 7-11 May in New York City, where you can also exclusively shop the ‘Acne Studios Loves Jonathan Lyndon Chase’ collection. Beginning in late June, you can find it in select stores and online.

acnestudios.com