A Father-Son Conversation Led To Acne Studios’s Collaboration With Hussein Chalayan

Two years ago, Jonny Johansson received a call from his 23-year-old son, Frasse – who runs No Cricket, a vintage shop stocked with Rick Owens, Raf Simons and Comme des Garçons in Acne Studios’s home city of Stockholm – in search of inspiration. Johansson suggested he look at the theatrical shows of Hussein Chalayan, the British-Cypriot designer whose 1993 Central Saint Martins graduate collection, The Tangent Flows – featuring garments buried in soil with iron filings for six weeks to decompose and oxidise – debuted three years before Johansson launched his own brand by sending 100 pairs of red-stitched jeans to friends and family. “I got a call 24 hours later,” Johansson says. “He was like, ‘Woah!’”

It was an exchange that encouraged Johansson to consider more deeply his longstanding respect for Chalayan’s practice: clothing that bridged art, design and spectacle, exploring subjects as varied as displacement and aerodynamics while remaining eminently wearable. “I thought, ‘Perhaps I can reach out to Hussein and ask if we can study his collections using the tools of our brand,’” he says. And so Johansson “cold called” Chalayan – who currently works as a professor of fashion design at HTW Berlin – via email, and a 12-piece capsule collection, accompanied by a limited-edition book, was born.

“The collection is an homage, and represents nothing less than admiration,” Johansson explains. “For me, fashion history has come to be a great source of pride, in an industry which, in many ways, can feel quite light.” He concedes that any of Chalayan’s collections could have provided the starting point, but it was three from the early ’00s – Ventriloquy (2001), Medea (2002) and Manifest Destiny (2003) – that inspired the creative exchange between his design team and Chalayan. The resulting edit of denim and cotton separates, with their layered, patchworked and asymmetric flourishes, celebrates Chalayan’s inventive approach to construction, as well as a fascination with materiality that unites both designers. “When someone asks me what I do,” Johansson adds, “I say, ‘I work with fabric.’”

“Looking back, the collaboration has made me realise the real risks we took at the time, and how timeless the collections looked,” says Chalayan, reflecting on the seminal work he produced with a core team of just ten more than two decades ago. Ventriloquy, for example, opened with digital figures on screens – strangely prescient in an industry now preoccupied with AI – and featured garments reproduced first in fabric, then in cast resin. The final six skirts were shattered onstage by models wielding small mallets. But for the designer – who stopped producing collections and staging shows at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre during the Covid-19 pandemic – the real joy came from working with Acne Studios’s young design team. “How a new generation looks at your work really extends the life of what you have done,” he says. “They were total perfectionists, so diligent and respectful.”

Chalayan, though, is self-deprecating about his influence on contemporary fashion. “I’m a designer that’s kind of forgotten,” he continues. “Specialists know me and people in fashion know my work, but it’s not out there… I’m not doing collections.” There is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. Two of his most celebrated creations – a wooden table that transforms into a tiered skirt and his 1999 Airmail dress, made from Tyvek and designed to be folded into an envelope and posted – are currently on display in Tate Britain’s The 90s: Art and Fashion exhibition. Meanwhile, Olivia Rodrigo wore a version of his spring/summer 2016 disintegrating dress on the opening night of The Unraveled Tour. A new audience is clearly hungry for his way of thinking. “My original dress took about one and a half minutes to melt on stage,” Chalayan adds. “But Olivia’s had to be timed exactly with the seconds of her entire performance.”

In an industry plagued by creative-director musical chairs, revenue chasing and boardrooms dictating design, there’s something refreshing about Acne Studios devoting a capsule collection to another designer’s work – particularly in its own 30th anniversary year. The mutual respect between Johansson and Chalayan is palpable. “I will always,” Chalayan says with a smile, “cherish this experience.”