By Chloe Welling
Welcome to Acne Studios Corporation. Here you’ll find the exceptionally well-dressed–albeit absent–boss in a bubblegum-pink leather jacket. The overworked, underpaid mid-level on his morning commute bearing the weight of both a ludicrously capacious satchel and the company. The intern in denim cut-offs, navigating a world they have not yet learned how to dress for. Then there’s the personality hire, amiable and professionally unburdened, brandishing a t-shirt with a tie drawn on with Magic Marker.
These characters formed the conceptual framework for Jonny Johansson’s Spring 2027 menswear collection. They are also archetypes that feel unfortunately recognisable. Although exaggerated to the point of camp, Johansson’s office ecosystem distills the essence of corporate stereotypes with unsettling accuracy.
The silhouette, like much of this season, was insistently narrow. Denim wrapped the leg like a second skin, overcoats were lean and attenuated and the quintessential Acne Studios cardigan clung close to the torso. It was a refreshing, modern look that, frankly, feels cool. Acne Studios’ client tends to agree: a renewed demand for skinny jeans prompted Johanson to design slimmer cuts reminiscent of the brand’s 1996 and 1979 fits this season. Whether this revival reflects the natural swing of fashion’s pendulum away from the oversized, or a hangover from the GLP-1 era, remains an open question.
Johansson’s colour story was a highlight of the season. A pink leather jacket sat over a pistachio green cardigan and pale pink shirt, finished with an ice-cream parlour stripe at the collar. Aubergine leather trousers grounded a mid-century, windowpane check knit that landed somewhere between suburban accountant and 70s rock eccentric. As for the details, the logo embroidered on knitwear now simply reads Acne Studios, the long-standing indifferent face motif now retired. That particular expression, it seems, is now reserved for the corporate wearer.
Outerwear was where Johansson sang this season. A glossy berry nylon coach jacket and a matte reversible blouson in powder blue were frontrunners. The collection’s chief executive, however, was the drawstring-waisted photographer’s jacket adorned with exaggerated epaulettes and overdrawn shoulders.
Footwear amplified the collection’s knowing theatricality. Winklepicker cowboy boots arrived in cherry red, eggplant and optic white. Their addition extended the collection’s exploration of corporate conformity and performative individuality.
What made the collection evocative was Johansson’s understanding that corporate dress has become untethered from corporate identity itself. Offices have dissolved into hybrid schedules and laissez faire dresscodes, rendering the old visual language of corporate wear available for parody, nostalgia and reinvention. Johansson wasn’t proposing a new uniform so much as cataloguing the strange afterlife of the old one. Nevertheless, in Johansson’s corporate universe, dressing for the office is far from a chore.