About 18 months ago Jonny Johansson was hanging with his son and a friend, when they started chatting about looksmaxxing. “I thought, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ So I looked into it. And it’s this rabbit hole on Tiktok, for young men who want to look their best. It’s tips about how to make yourself beautiful by going to the gym, skin care, enhancing your masculinity—and I guess increasing your chances of mating.”
Johansson transferred his observations of this contemporary version of a perennial masculine teenage phase into the basis of the worn character around which this Acne Studios collection was built. Both body conscious and clothes conscious, he wore cropped deep-necked fictional-gym shirts as a sort of competitive statement. Leg days were not overlooked either: “The guys are into boxer shorts these days. It’s not jersey underwear anymore,” declared Johansson with authority.
As well as looksmaxxing his cipher was looks-nerding, adopting gentlemanly Alan Flusser favorites including Acne adaptations of classic loafers and a new hyper-harmonic jeans cut called the 2010. There was what to this looks-nerd looked like a near quintessential black leather blouson jacket cut with wide zipped pockets sitting on the rail alongside us.
The brand’s popular trompe l’oeil jeans were teamed with a check cotton overdyed shirt that doubled over itself to be wearable both longsleeve and short. Check jacket-shirt hybrids cut tight were worn with ties over roomy double-silk chinos. To match the elaborate exactitude of the attitude and the self-awareness that inspired it, many of the looks were accompanied by the brand’s oversized camera bags, some aspects of which were incorporated into the garments themselves. This was an intelligently generous and non-judgmental conversation-collection centered around that digital manifestation of masculinity’s perpetual self-reflexivity. It looked maxx.
