Under chandelier lights, beneath a vaulted ceiling, with draped beige curtains and carpets that seem to melt into the floor, Denim Hystoria, Acne Studios’ Spring/Summer 2027 collection, unfolds at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. The name itself is a syncretism, much like the collection: a collision between historical dress, Renaissance references, and the brand’s own story with denim, which began with a hundred pairs of jeans in 1996.
Thirty years later, the “most ubiquitous thing we wear” becomes the starting point for a collection that, as creative director Jonny Johansson put it, “brings together two things that don’t belong”. The ambience, much like the collection itself, should feel regal in the sum of its parts—chandeliers and carpets suggest a palace, but the room is far from pristine. Curtains hang deliberately undone from the ceiling, like those that would cover the furniture of a place long left unoccupied. From the chairs to the patinated leather breeches and bags, everything feels worn, handled, lived in. Even the carpets pooling onto the floor, by Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed, seem to have arrived from another time.
This tension between the plebeian and the majestic is one of the collection’s driving forces. High-collar shirts are cut in technical taffeta that Marie Antoinette could never have worn, yet their sheen recalls the porcelain of her palace. Renaissance portrait brooches go hand in hand with what looks like a dachshund transformed into an earring. Actual picture frames become buckles for belts and embellishments on satin shoes, while among the pointed courtly footwear, there are metal shoes that appear distinctly of our own century.
Throughout the collection, “denim becomes a canvas that moves through time”. It’s everywhere, constantly shapeshifting. It appears as a portrait; at other times, it is distressed, lined with satin or lacquered with flower motifs. The material is manipulated into sculptural forms, smocked tops and cropped jackets. It feels playful and modern, in tune with Acne Studios’ trajectory. We should also say hystorical, a filter that reimagines history through a distinctly contemporary lens and sense of humour.
The 30th-anniversary scene looks as if someone had taken a painting from a museum and started pulling its smallest elements out of frame, only to place them in a modern woman’s wardrobe. Courtly undergarments work as everyday statement pieces in relaxed fabrics, while decadent, voluminous skirts carry prints from the queen’s dresser, reworked through the latest pattern-making. An extract from Prince Charming by Adam and the Ants accompanies the collection as if it were a lady’s maid. Their 80s “new rakishness” style surely influenced the glam-rock aesthetic that runs through the collection.
There is no farthingale needed to hold these skirts in place, but there is plenty of majesty, and plenty of relatability, in this guillotine-sentenced, scroll-addicted queen.
