During a Frieze week dominated by gallery dinners and art world spectacle, Acne Studios quietly dropped one of the year's most considered fashion collaborations. The Swedish label has teamed up with Hussein Chalayan, the Turkish-Cypriot designer twice named British Designer of the Year, for a 12-piece capsule that reaches back into his early 2000s archive and brings it forward through denim, jersey and leather.
The Designer's Designer
Chalayan is what you might call your favourite designer's favourite designer. Since launching his label in 1994, he has consistently treated clothing as a laboratory for ideas about identity, architecture, technology and anthropology. His runway shows are performance art in their own right. In Afterwords, his autumn/winter 2000 collection, chair covers were transformed into dresses and a coffee table became a skirt before the audience's eyes. He buried his Central Saint Martins graduate collection underground before the show, digging it up to send it down the runway covered in soil.
That willingness to subvert expectations is precisely what drew Acne Studios founder Jonny Johansson to the project. I have always found Hussein's work to be incredible. He has had a gigantic impact on fashion, and I wanted to bring that back, Johansson said. It's a very special feeling when you work with someone you look up to. All you can do is let them be free to do what they do.
Three Collections, One Archive
The capsule draws from three of Chalayan's most celebrated collections: Ventriloquy (2001), Medea (2002) and Manifest Destiny (2003). The result is a greatest hits package reinterpreted through Acne Studios' signature materials. Patchwork jeans come in the brand's 1996 and 2009 silhouettes. A twisted pair carries a trompe l'oeil python print. An asymmetrical denim vest and shirt bring Chalayan's layered, cut-and-sew approach to Acne's denim language.
Beyond denim, the collection extends to jersey with two asymmetrical tank tops, two layered cotton mini dresses and a logo T-shirt. The Camero, one of Acne Studios' most recognisable handbags, returns in a patchwork leather version that feels like a natural extension of Chalayan's deconstructive instinct rather than a forced branding exercise.
Shot Inside the Museum Archive
The campaign was photographed inside London's V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria and Albert Museum's new public storage facility in east London. The choice of location is far from incidental. Many of Chalayan's creations sit in the museum's permanent collection, and the setting places the new pieces alongside his archived work, suspended between gilded frames and mobile shelving racks.
The images feel less like a fashion campaign and more like a quiet act of preservation. Contemporary denim hangs alongside museum artefacts, blurring the line between what is current and what is canonical. It is a fitting setting for a collaboration that is as much about passing down knowledge as it is about selling clothes.
A Book Called Reference
Alongside the collection, Acne Studios has published a limited-edition book titled Reference: Hussein Chalayan, edited by London curator Charlene Prempeh and limited to 1,000 copies. Contributors include journalist Caroline Roux, Design Museum chief curator Johanna Agerman Ross, V&A senior fashion curator Oriole Cullen and designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello.
The book explores Chalayan's lasting influence on fashion and design, positioning the collaboration within a wider cycle of creation, archiving and reinterpretation. As Chalayan himself put it: Seeing the work interpreted made me realise that certain ideas can continue to resonate and evolve beyond their original context.
The Acne Studios x Hussein Chalayan capsule is available now at Acne Studios stores worldwide and at acnestudios.com. The Reference book is sold alongside the collection while copies last.