Acne Studios

Acne Studios is a Swedish luxury fashion house founded in Stockholm in 1996 by Jonny Johansson, Mats Johansson, Jesper Kouthoofd, and Tomas Skoging. It began not as a fashion label but as a multidisciplinary creative collective named ACNE, spanning graphic design, film, and advertising, with the clothing line emerging as one branch among several.

The fashion business traces to 1997, when Johansson produced 100 pairs of raw denim jeans with red contrast stitching and gave them away to friends and family. Press attention drove wholesale demand from Swedish boutiques, and the first full ready-to-wear collection followed in 1998 under the name Acne Jeans. Red contrast stitching on raw and selvedge denim became the brand's founding signature.

The fashion business spun off as a standalone company, Acne Studios, in 2006, separating from the collective's film, advertising, and digital divisions. The first Paris store opened in 2008 beneath the Palais-Royal arcades, and the house staged its inaugural Paris Fashion Week runway show in 2010, the same year Mattias Magnusson was appointed CEO.

Jonny Johansson, a founder, has been Creative Director since 1996. A former musician with no formal fashion training, Johansson built the brand's codes around oversized, sculptural silhouettes, custom-developed fabrics, and an emphasis on tailoring. The house historically avoided conventional campaign advertising, building its identity instead through publishing and exhibitions.

The house is known for several recurring codes: the Musubi bag, an origami-knot leather handbag introduced in 2017 and inspired by Japanese obi sashes; the Face motif, a two-dot, one-line emoticon launched as a clutch in 2013; the oversized fringed Canada scarf; and the salmon-pink shopping bag credited with helping popularize millennial pink. The Blå Konst line, launched in 2017, re-anchored the brand to its denim origins.

Acne Studios is the most internationally recognized Scandinavian contemporary-luxury house, with estimated group revenue of €300–350 million in 2024 and roughly 1,000 employees across 15 countries. The company is majority-controlled by Johansson and executive chairman Mikael Schiller, with minority stakes held by IDG Capital and Hong Kong's I.T Group since 2018; CEO Mattias Magnusson has set a target of €500 million in annual revenue. The brand operates stores across Europe, North America, and Asia, including in Stockholm, Paris, London, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, and China. It introduced its first fragrance, created with perfumer Frédéric Malle, in 2024, and finalized B Corp certification the same year, entering its 30th-anniversary year in 2026 under continued founder control.