“That’s a good look right there—I like that,” said Shawn Stüssy as the first model passed us, and he wasn’t wrong. It was also just the first of many highly-likable looks in this strong Acne Studios collection.
Backstage, Jonny Johansson said that six months ago he’d been thinking about all the sheer dressing he was seeing, and started to go strongly in his own direction. He shaped a collection whose supporting beam was the masculine/feminine. So we saw many excellent womenswear looks that were styled around archetypally masculine pieces, and set on semi-satirically, over-emphasized masculine footwear: tooled leather cowboy boots with extra-extended cutter toes and work boots with swollen uppers.
Oversized blazers came in treated leathers and suedes and paper-effect fabric, over straight-cut high-rise jeans with a generous break. Long-hemmed check shirts were sometimes layered over sheer skirts. An oversized biker with wide whipstitch details was a gorgeous remixed archetype.
Johansson filtered the conventional lens of gendered gaze with gestures that included the cut-out garments whose voids acted as frames for photographic images by artist Pacifico Silano. Corseted and girdled womenswear, its silhouette pushed out away from the body, was papered over with jigsaw-like irregular patches of lace: these brittle cocoons of femininity made for a sly, raised-eyebrow critique to the conventional pendulum of opposition in gender-defined dressing. Another gag were the gaudy and chunky crystal earrings worn with some of the most hyper-masculine looks.
Johansson’s fellow Swede Robyn contributed a soundtrack that started with a version of “Robotboy” and then spiraled into a fantastic deconstructed ear-smacking sonic soup. The set, all wood veneer walls and brown carpet, was made to look like a cigar box: “I wanted something ultra-traditional to represent this never ending story, and why I was questioning it,” said Johansson. This was a clever collection that he was also smart enough to ensure remained highly wearable.
