Cue your shopping basket: thecorner.com is launching another exclusive collaboration, this time with Swedish conceptual wunderkind Jonny Johansson and his Acne Studios. The luxury online marketplace, which is part of the YOOX Group, presents designer-driven “corner” mini-boutiques to impress a Fifth-Avenue-department-store feel on the virtual shopper. It will offer two direct-from-runway looks — one men’s and one women’s — from Acne’s fall/winter 2013 collection.
Johansson is no stranger to creative or commercial collaboration. His blockbuster line of jeans for Lanvin in 2008 launched him into mainstream consciousness, and this season’s collection marks a fusion of his tailored-meets-tech sensibility with that of artist Katerina Jebb. Johansson and Jebb went digging for vintage inspiration at Musée Galliera, the fashion history museum in Paris, for Acne’s first Parisian presentation. Inspired by the interiors of the historic garments, Johansson deployed large chain-stitch decorative effects while Jebb designed photomontage documentarian prints in the clothes.
The collection highlights Johansson’s evolving interest in big shapes, nipping in boxy, tailored jackets and gilets at the waist with what seems an invisible drawstring, and offering bias dresses with askew, trailing hems that feel reminiscent of the slinkiness of Galliano’s late 1990s slip dresses — without the sex. The palette, as is typical of Acne’s collections, is saturated and electric, this time in primary tonal ranges that jump from 18th-century chintz to color-by-number. Jebb’s prints of tattered seams, paired with Johansson’s uniquely scaled tailoring for the chicly laissez-faire, imbue the designs (appropriately) with the feeling of having been found in a dress-up chest.
The two capsule looks exclusive to thecorner.com and Acne boutiques, available beginning Sept. 17, lean more toward the futurist-driven, technical textile end of Johansson’s creative spectrum. Both feature Acne’s stellar manipulation of figure-framing tailoring and are treated with panels of the design house’s now-signature foil treatment. “With the foil, we are filling out the negative space with our own identity,” Johansson explains. “The contemporary-futuristic element that counterbalances the historic aspect of the collection.”
Johansson’s work has always resonated on a deeper level, reinforcing Acne’s founding mission and acronym, “Ambition to Create Novel Expressions.” He has cited a diversity of muses over the years, from Swedish playwright August Strindberg to erotic sculptor Hans Bellmer. The creative director’s interest in a cross-pollination of disciplines seems like a major factor in thecorner.com’s collaborative stake; after all, the site is part of a larger ecosystem of online retail that readily merges talents and products from the worlds of art, design and, of course, fashion.
While Moda Operandi, the giant of direct-to-runway, hosts a broad range of designer collections big and small, thecorner.com seems to be framing its relationships very carefully and with an artfulness that reinforces the authenticity of their offering and the “DNA” of each partner. One can be sure that — though small — this capsule will be the latest commercial hit in Acne’s string of successful retail collaborations.