SOPHIE HICKS ARCHITECTS

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’.