Jonny Johansson on 30 years of Acne Studios: ‘I look forward much more than I look back’

Acne Studios started with just 100 pairs of blue jeans, cut from raw selvedge denim and recognisable for their red top-stitching, rather than the typical yellow. Then called simply Acne – an acronym for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions – they were distributed by co-founder Jonny Johansson and his collaborators to their creative community across Stockholm, from artists to skaters (the Swedish capital remains the brand’s home city, with its head office occupying the former Czech embassy, a Brutalist building designed by the architect Jan Bočan).

Conceived as a calling card of sorts for what was then a burgeoning creative agency, the jeans’ cult success saw Johansson pivot to fashion (in 2006, Acne became Acne Studios, while ACNE, Ambition to Create Novel Expressions, continues as a separate entity under Deloitte Digital). Thirty years on, Acne Studios is now a global fashion brand that shows twice a year as part of Paris Fashion Week and has over 70 stores worldwide (recent additions include Gansevoort Street in New York, which opened in September 2026 as part of the city’s fashion week). It is projected to exceed $500 million in sales next year.

Jonny Johansson on 30 years of Acne Studios:

‘Honestly, I thought it went very fast,’ says Johansson, who now also serves as the brand’s creative director. ‘Thirty years – it’s a lot on paper, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.’

Wallpaper* – which itself is marking its 30th anniversary this year – was the first publication to feature Acne Studios, one of the milestones that Johansson cites as formative to the label. ‘Our very first piece of coverage was in Wallpaper*,’ he remembers. ‘Tyler [Brûlé, Wallpaper* founder] had been walking the streets of Sweden, saw our offices, and got intrigued. Back then our rule was “everything has to be made by us”. So the office looked different, I guess?’ Other milestones include a collaboration with the late Alber Elbaz, then at Lanvin (‘It was like being touched by God back then’); the brand's first store outside of Stockholm, in Paris’ Palais Royal; and showing at Paris Fashion Week for the first time in 2013, as well as working with the likes of Björk and Tricky.

The 30th anniversary has been marked by a special edition of Acne Paper – a yearly magazine of which Acne Studios serves as publisher – titled ‘Autoportrait’ and released this past June, as well as a denim campaign by Nan Goldin. Though the landmark has proved something of a challenge for Johansson, who says, ‘I look forward much more than I look back.’

It is why, rather than revelling in nostalgia, with Goldin’s campaign he decided to take it back to denim – the brand’s foundational material and still a definitive part of its oeuvre today. ‘Denim is the perfect canvas. It’s rooted in today, but it also ages; it becomes something else through its story,’ he says. ‘I’m very emotionally attached to it; I always have been. What's interesting about denim is that it personalises itself through wearing it – it becomes yours. You don’t really throw jeans away.

‘I also like the juxtaposition of something couture, something very fashion, next to a plain pair of jeans – it makes sense to me, that tension,’ he continues. For him, a good pair of jeans is ‘about a specific feeling and colour’; his own preference is a blue with ‘some red in it; that deep, rich indigo’. Shape-wise? The ‘1996’, a straight-leg silhouette that evokes the original 100 pairs of jeans. ‘It’s iconic, very basic, a classic.’ (The style is part of a 30th-anniversary capsule alongside the ‘2009’ bootcut style; each pair comes in two washes: a raw selvedge and one which appears well-loved and worn, as if before and after).

Working with Goldin, an artist and activist known for her photography of sub- and counterculture, felt like an apt fit for the milestone campaign (Acne Studios describes its design vocabulary as ‘Scandinavian sensibility [meeting] a countercultural impulse’). ‘Nan’s work has been an inspiration so many times over the years,’ says Johansson. ‘So when we realised we had 30 years to celebrate, it felt like the right moment to finally ask her. I wanted an icon, but I also wanted something intimate, something personal – denim is close to you, it’s gritty, it's real, and I wanted the imagery to feel the same way.’

The campaign comprises a series of portraits of ten of Acne Studios’ friends and collaborators (multidisciplinary in approach, the brand has united with numerous artists, musicians, writers and photographers across various collections during its lifespan). These include model and photographer Guinevere Van Seenus, artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase, actor and musician Juliette Lewis, and artist Sandra Poulson, among others.

‘They're people from our universe – people we've collaborated with, spoken to, had some kind of exchange with over the years,’ says Johansson. ‘In total we chose ten. It could have been 200, easily, because there are so many people who mean something to the brand. But ten felt right. I wanted to shoot friends rather than just models – for this, it felt more interesting to show the creative output of these people and their relationship to our world, rather than just the clothing.’

Later this evening, at Paris’ Collège des Bernardins, Johansson will show his latest womenswear collection for the brand as part of the city’s fashion week. And, though there will be a 30th-anniversary dinner and party after the show to mark the occasion, don’t expect the collection itself to look towards the past. ‘I don't try to foresee the future exactly, but I'm always striving toward it rather than sitting with what's already happened,’ he says. ’I’m not interested in nostalgia for its own sake. I’d rather take something familiar and keep pushing it somewhere new.’

‘Fashion, for me, is a moving, emotional species – never still, never fully calculated,’ he continues. ‘Trying to stay “now”, trying to put some aesthetic on the moment you're in – that's the whole secret.’

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