Interview

PP: Do you ever go up to reindeer country?

JJ: I am from reindeer country. I am even from beyond there. I grew up in a place called Umeå. It's an eight-hour drive north of Stockholm. I am really from a small town.

PP: Why is Swedish craftsmanship so extraordinary? Everything Swedes touch is harmonious. Your tailoring, for example, is so impeccable. I know this is a cliché, but it seems to be an innate Swedish quality.

JJ: There's a lot of craftsmanship, if you look back in the history. We have H&M and Ikea, but design-wise I think we're also . . . not minimal, but a bit functional. We have something called lagom, which means "just in the middle." We like to be in the middle. [laughs] I don't know how to explain it.

PP: Is that because it's practically a socialist country?

JJ: Probably, yes.

PP: The Swedish government must just love you.

JJ: I don't know. But the princess did come to visit me.

PP: When do you get to the office in the morning?

JJ: Around nine or ten. I actually walk to work, past City Hall, which is a big inspiration for me because Ragnar Östberg, the architect, was from the neoclassic period. He was into nationalism in architecture, so there is a lot of Viking inspiration mixed with Italian piazza and Swedish modernism. I always find something new every time I go past. Then I go over the canal to work. We're in the old part of Stockholm, from the 16th century, so we have a really old building. Our showroom is in a big ballroom. We have a manager named Magnus at the office. So you walk past Magnus and say hello, and he is decorating-he decorates and he takes care of us at the same time. You find different decorations in different corners of the office. He did a lot of sculptures with these paper cones that you pour perfume with.

PP: It's your office manager making sculptures?

JJ: Yes.

PP: So everybody is really creative at ACNE, no matter what their job is supposed to be.

JJ: Yes. I work mainly with the fashion part. I don't like
to sit so much. I basically run around. I visit different people in town and talk to artists.

PP: Are you a collector?

JJ: I am. I love people who collect. I don't know why.

PP: Do you collect people?

JJ: I collect people's experiences. I feel that I build myself not only on my experience, but on other people's. That's important to me. I like to work with people who are better at what they do than I am. I like to work with people who are willing to share.

PP: Do you also collect old guitars?

JJ: do. One of my best friends has the biggest collection of guitars. He plays guitar in the band the Cardigans. I have a small one. But I have a guitar in the office all the time. I change it every month.

PP: What guitar do you have in there now?

JJ: Now I have a Fender Jaguar from 1965. It's black, a custom color, and was made pre-CBS, -before CBS bought Fender.

PP: What do you do at the office?

JJ: Every day I work with shapes and silhouettes. I jump around different departments. One department is doing shoes, another does menswear, another jeans.

PP: I love your children's toys, especially the stuffed-animal bear. The toy factory is in the same building, right?

JJ: Yes, we have five stories. We have a whole building, quite swollen. It's an old bank.

PP: Do you wear ACNE clothes to work?

JJ: The more I work in fashion, the less I dress up. The first pair of jeans I made was for my own body-my "strange body," as I call it.

PP: This collaboration with Alber Elbaz and Lanvin is a cool match.

JJ: It's such a trip, to be honest, to work with somebody I admire. The first collection for Spring-Summer 2009 is all about being dramatic. We found a female bullfighter, the first woman accepted in the ring to do a man's job. We found that so intriguing we started to play with it. We tried to borrow from old bullfighting costumes. I also met with Madame Wang.

PP: She's the owner of Lanvin now and the one who brought on Alber.

JJ: She's smart. Their relationship feels very close. When I asked her if she'd been to Sweden, she said, "Yes, I went with a friend to the Nobel Prize -Ceremony," and I was like, "Whoa."

PP: We haven't mentioned the fact that you have your own magazine, Acne Paper.

JJ: It's our crown jewel. It actually started with a stylist friend of mine, whom I always work with: Mattias Karlsson. He's one of the most important persons for me. I met Thomas Persson through him. We met at a party and started talking. I needed help with some press releases. He wrote one, and I was just blown away. He said, "Well, why don't we do a magazine?" I was like, "Okay, in that case we'll do a real magazine." We said, "Let's try to work with the best, let's do what we want, let's show what we talk about every time we do a collection and what we talk about during the creative process that's never shown in the clothing." Because there's a lot of energy left over. And maybe most important, "Let's go out and try to connect with people."