How Acne Studios created an entire empire from 100 pairs of jeans

It started 25 years ago with a pair of jeans. One hundred pairs, actually. Dark denim with red stitching. Acne Studios – then known as Acne – was a jack of all trades creative collective with its hand in graphic design, film, even furniture, wanted to break into fashion, too. The brand quite literally stood for “Ambition to Create Novel Expressions.”

So Acne Studios creative director and co-founder Jonny Johansson called up a factory in Italy to see about making 100 pairs of jeans. “When I said 100, he thought I meant 100,000,” Johansson says. “When he got to know that we were going to do 100 pairs, he just laughed and didn’t call us back.”

At 53 years old, Johansson sits at the helm of a brand that has grown exponentially – and unexpectedly – since that first pair of jeans in 1997. A brand that shows comfortably among the major houses at Paris Fashion Week. A brand that has over 60 stores worldwide. A brand that has not once, not even for a moment, lost its mojo.

Despite Acne Studios’ runaway success, Johansson himself remains somewhat unknowable. While analogous designers have become celebrities in their own right – even Balenciaga’s once elusive Demna now has a palpable persona – Johansson is notably un-famous. He doesn’t have a curated appearance, like Rick Owens, Tom Ford or the late Karl Lagerfeld. He looks like a regular Swedish bloke; jeans, a T-shirt. Lately, a pair of clear-framed glasses. He doesn’t have Instagram, doesn’t do many interviews.

The designer calls me from his office in Acne Studios’ brutalist HQ – formerly the Czechoslovakian embassy – to discuss a subject he is passionate about. “My dog’s name is Denim,” he says, referring to his three-year-old dachshund. “So if you don’t think I’m serious about denim...”

I ask Johansson what sort of jeans Swedes were wearing in the late 1990s and he responds without hesitation: “Levi’s 501s.” That’s it? “That’s it. No more no less.” He describes the moment as “the end of that whole thing” – just before Helmut Lang and the second wave of Calvin Klein broke open the denim market. “When we started, it was sort of the break of something new coming,” he says.

Still, the designer insists that Acne Studios’ debut pairs were little more than an instinctual first foray into fashion. They weren’t actively thinking about gaps in the market, or about shifting tastes. “We more had this desire to make some sort of fashion statement, some sort of start to our journey,” he says, adding that denim is “the most important fashion garment for people in all generations.”

After that initial miscommunication with the Italian factory, Johansson and his crew found another factory in Italy prepared to manufacture just 100 pairs of five-pocket jeans, most of which were gifted to friends and people that they “thought were cool.” The jeans were slimmer and sturdier than 501s, but the distinguishing characteristic was that red stitching. “At least they looked different,” Johansson says, noting that the stitching itself, which was done in the west of Sweden in Borås, was “totally crooked.” He’s quick to downplay the significance of the red thread. “There have been vintage brands from the 1960s with red stitching, so I don’t think it was that unique, to be honest.”

Others have a different take. Ask anyone who was active in the Stockholm fashion scene in the late 1990s what their first memory of Acne Studios is and they will more often than not mention one thing. “They had those denim jeans with red stitches and a red flame on the back pocket and all the cool kids were wearing them,” recalls Ursula Wångander, a stylist and model who broke into the industry about a decade before the brand set up shop. “You saw them everywhere in the street.” Wångander recalls visiting the brand’s very first office, above the party shop Butterick’s on the tourist-heavy walking street Drottninggatan. “They had an Atari game machine from the 1980s and all the guys working there were so cool.”

Demand for more jeans was immediate. “It went really fast,” says Johansson. “We weren’t really structured or prepared for what happened.” Luckily, in 2001, Johansson was introduced to someone who would put in place the structure necessary to take Acne Studios to the next level. Mikael Schiller was studying for a master’s degree in business at Stockholm’s prestigious Handelshögskolan when he was brought in to meet Johansson. “A friend of a friend called and asked if I could write an investment memorandum for Acne Action Jeans,” says Schiller, noting that “that’s what it was called at that time.” “It was basically a fashion company that I had never heard of.”

When they met that fateful summer, Johansson told Schiller that his vision was to “combine denim with prêt-à-porter.” It was a novel proposition. As Schiller puts it, “at the time you were either an H&M customer, a Levi’s customer or a Saint Laurent customer.” Still, game-changing boutique Colette in Paris was already proving there were people eager to pair 60 euro Nikes with 2,000 euro cocktail dresses. “People were starting to shop in another way,” he says.

Though Schiller had never worked in fashion – his previous gig had been at an internet investment company – he took to the environment right away. “The whole creative aspect of things was very inspiring and fun for me,” he says. It wasn’t a totally unprecedented career move; in high school he had written a paper stating he dreamed of becoming the CEO of H&M.

It was going to start and end at the investment memorandum, but then... “Johnny said, ‘You seem to be good at business, do you want to become the managing director?’” Schiller recalls. “I could see he was a really smart guy, quite quickly,” says Johansson. Schiller’s first task was to raise 10 million SEK. Then 9/11 happened. He met “all the venture capitalists” and any creative Swede who might have some cash to spare – producer Max Martin, director Johan Renck – no one was interested in buying what he was selling.

Acne Studios scaled down, Johansson parted ways with some of the original founders, and it was decided, officially, that Schiller would be responsible for the business side of things (today he holds the title executive chairman and co-owner) and Johansson would handle the creative. “Doing a fashion company is more than just design, isn’t it?” says Johansson.

It was Schiller who gave his friend, super model Caroline Winberg, her first pair of Acne Studios jeans. “They were dark blue with a red seam and I think it was the first thing I ever got gifted,” she says. According to Winberg, before the brand entered the scene, the Swedish denim market was dominated by Gul & Blå and Filippa K. Acne Studios had a totally different “vibe.” “The red seam was very trendy,” she says. “My friends from New York always asked me to buy all the Acne jeans for them when I went to Stockholm.”

Meanwhile, just as the going was getting tough, something major happened . Johansson took a trip to Tokyo and when he came back, he said to Schiller, quite poignantly, “I know what I want to do.” Enter the Hex, a second-skin denim that would come to be on the legs of every model, blogger and fashion-minded person by the mid-aughts. Ideally paired with the brand’s Pistol boots – another smash hit – the ubiquity of the Hex cannot be overstated. “People thought they were really weird in the beginning,” recalls Schiller. “But basically, we got a hit with that.” In 2003, the brand opened its very first store, in Stockholm’s central city shopping mall PK Huset and three years later, the brand added ‘Studios’ to its name.

Today, Acne Studios’ denim offering runs the gamut from super skinny to extra wide, a fluid smörgåsbord for evolving preferences. Schiller gravitates towards the easy, dad-jean fit of the 2003 in blue or black (“I’m a boring older man,” he jokes), but the extra wide, drag-on-the-floor boot-cut is the style du jour. Johansson is no stranger to changing tastes himself. He grew up seeing his mum in flares, a cut that “wasn’t really cool.” Steadfast in his style at the time, Johansson swore to his mother he would never, ever wear flare jeans. “So she had me sign a contract. She printed out a contract, and I signed it,” he says. “She kept it and showed it to me a few years later.” Flares are a common player in today’s Acne Studios silhouette.

From this vantage point, Schiller points out that it was quite a big swing for Johansson to start with denim – crazy, even. “Johnny had this reference, it’s like saying I’m going to launch a new Coca-Cola now,” he says. The established American players – Lee, Levi’s, Wrangler – were so unstoppable it was radical for some local Swedish creatives to shoot their shot.

Now, not only is Acne Studios on par with other fashion houses, it also sits in the pantheon of major Swedish exporters, further proof that this little Nordic country is adept at producing international titans. It’s something that means a lot to Swedes, especially those in the fashion industry. Wångander put it best, saying, “You feel proud of Acne. In the same way that you say, ‘We have Ikea,’ you say, ‘We have Acne.’ It makes you kind of proud, being Swedish.”

I ask Johansson if there’s anything inherently Swedish about Acne Studios today. He tells me that while the brand was coming up, all of the brand’s business cards had the word “international” embossed on them. “There was always the idea that we were not local,” he says. “But the older I become, I realise that I do have a heritage.” A couple of years ago, the designer found himself at a Hilma af Klint exhibition – the same Swedish painter who inspired the visual identity of this magazine – and he had an epiphany that on the walls were the colours of Acne Studios. “I was thinking, that’s my mother’s colours, and that’s my colour,” he says. “So I might be, in some way, locally infused.”

For its autumn/winter 2022 show in Paris, Acne Studios opened and closed with denim. There were floor-skimming denim skirts and paperbag trousers, crafted meticulously from upcycled scraps. The closing look, an extraordinary patchwork denim ball gown – a blue jean bride – served as the stunning culmination of Johansson’s dream of marrying denim with ready-to-wear. A single look marching from the past towards the future.