It needs to be said that Acne Studios is more than the commercial Face series with its signature motif running rampant on everything from T-shirts to tote bags. The Swedish brand is also unlike what you’d expect from a Scandinavian brand; the vibe is not all clean and minimal as though able to merge seamlessly with Ikea décor.
The Acne Studios autumn/winter 2023 womenswear collection was a testament to its non-archetypal design aesthetic. “With this collection I was thinking about the dark winters we have in Sweden, where there are only a few hours of daylight. I wanted to capture the beauty of the darkness in both the collection and the set,” shares creative director Jonny Johansson in the collection notes.
Conceptualised by British creative Shona Heath, the set was a fantastical rendering of nature overtaking an urban space, with strange-looking vines and fauna reaching up towards the sky and enveloping crystals in the process. It provided the perfect backdrop for a collection inspired by nature but hardly conventionally pretty or beautiful.
The entire autumn/winter 2023 womenswear collection was intentionally gritty as though every piece was run through the ground. There were moments of crinkled georgettes cut to resemble dried up foliage in perhaps the collection’s most literal undertaking. But aside from those, there was a clever use of distressed and destruction to double down on the theme.
Take look 29 for example: a green knit dress riddled with tattered frays and incomplete knitting that were then topped off with fauna-like yarns as though the model had just stepped out from the undergrowth. Or even look 25 that was done in a similar shade of green, featuring a worn-out, duvet-like ensemble paired with footwear with vine-like straps laced up to the knees—a suggestion of nature’s stereotypical beauty but treated to appear almost in decay.
Expectedly, leathers were also given an aged touch with painted-on effects and vine-like lacings that gave off sudden inflections of obscenity (as though the idea of nature being shrivelled up and decaying is in itself obscene). These exposed lacings were then employed as trompe l’œil motifs quite splendidly done on a number of looks, especially on look 19 where it appeared as a suit seemingly “destroyed” with lacing.
The only visual respite to the dark side of nature was in look 26. A male model clad in only a haphazardly laced leather trousers (once again, painted for wear) with his entire top half painted with a scenery of a lush green forest and mountains. The collection notes refer to this as a “window onto nature”. But perhaps, the bigger narrative is that if nature is as beautiful as it is in its current state, why aren’t we doing more to stop its destruction?
View the full Acne Studios autumn/winter 2023 womenswear collection in the gallery below.
