ACNE PAPER, AUTOPORTRAIT

THE ATLAS OF ACNE STUDIOS

Words by Xerxes Cook. Interview with Sophie Hicks. May 2026

ACNE PAPER – AUTOPORTRAIT

For its twenty-first issue, Acne Paper presents Autoportrait – a special edition celebrating 30 years of Acne Studios through a self-portrait of the creative world that has grown around the house since its founding in Stockholm in 1996.

Looking across three decades of fashion, art, architecture, design, publishing and creative
collaboration, Autoportrait explores the cultural landscape that has shaped Acne Studios from the very beginning: independent, interdisciplinary and driven by curiosity rather than convention.

An excerpt from the book – an interview by Xerxes Cook with Sophie Hicks on the design of Acne Studios Seoul flagship store.

The Atlas of Acne Studios
By Xerxes Cook

‘In a well-designed store you shouldn’t even need to read the name over the door to have a sense of where you are,’ says Sophie Hicks, a former fashion editor who retrained at London’s Architecture Association. ‘Its message to the street should be infused with the spirit of the brand.’

Shortly after graduating from the AA, Sophie designed the seminal 1997 exhibition Sensation, which helped bring the YBAs (Young British Artists) to mainstream attention. Having previously worked in-house as a stylist for Alaïa, she then went on to design the brand’s New York store, as well as spaces for Chloé and Yohji Yamamoto.

Describing her experience of going from fashion to architecture, and then back again, she says, ‘At architecture school, it was drummed into you that style wasn’t important, that things don’t have to be beautiful. Of course style matters. What something looks like matters! Listen to Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast: the psychology of a person and what they wear are inextricably linked. As is the psychology of a brand and what they sell.’

From her studio in Notting Hill, she continues, ‘So, if you’re trying to do architecture for a brand, you have to understand the brand’s psychology, the creative director’s psychology, and how they work together.’ Sophie, who is not a mood-board person, had never been to Sweden when Acne Studios approached her in 2014 to design a store in New York’s West Village and the brand’s Seoul flagship. So the first step in her design process was to spend a few weeks getting to know the company and the country, trying to understand ‘the mindset of people who come from this cold place where they don’t have much light in the winter, where they sometimes commute from an island on a boat, and it only takes them twenty minutes to get to the centre of Stockholm from the archipelago’.

‘Acne Studios is very different from other brands, because they come from this strange place – that difference is their strength,’she concluded. In Seoul, her research manifested as a translucent light-box spanning two floors: ‘a white foggy container of Swedishness’ dropped into the chaos of the city’s Gangnam district, where it sits amid a small garden of wildflowers and wild strawberries typical of Scandinavia. So as not to compromise its archly minimalist interior, formed of rough concrete cast against timber to recall the boardwalks of Stockholm’s waterfront, the building’s functional components – its piping and plumbing, etc. – are placed on the roof, exposed, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s and Pompidou buildings.

Acne Studios’ only purpose-built detached store opened in 2015 and still stands in the centre of Seoul today. A decade is a lifetime in Gangnam years, as brands compete for a slice of South Koreans’ luxury spending – the highest per capita in the world – creating a constant churn of storefronts in the city’s high-end Cheongdam ward. Sophie attributes the longevity of her ‘heavy, brooding monster’ to its tactile communication, pointing out that when she says tactile, ‘It’s not necessarily what you touch – it’s also what touches your mind.’

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