The gallery will be a conceptual extension of Acne Paper, the well-regarded biannual magazine the brand founded in 2004 under the editorship of Thomas Persson. The title, in print until 2014, was revived in 2021 as a book, and has since returned to annual publication. Says Johansson of the new space: “It’s a place for the collaborators of Acne Paper to show themselves, and maybe start some new creative adventures. They should think about it as a new kind of blank page, with no gallery pressure.”
Palais Royal closed as a store a few months ago in order to make room for the new gallery. Its operations have been folded into those of Acne Studios’s two more recently opened Paris stores: one on Rue Saint-Honoré, the other on Rue Froissart in Le Marais. But Palais Royal remains an emblematic address for the brand.
Johansson recalls that when he first saw it back in 2007 or so, “I was in love, completely mesmerised.” However, Mikael Schiller, Acne Studios’s executive chair and Johansson’s co-owner of a 59 per cent majority stake in the brand, harboured reservations. “It was expensive. I remember we argued in the taxi afterwards about whether it was a good idea. But we had just had our first big interview in Vogue — that was one of the pieces in the puzzle that made us think bigger,” Johansson remembers. After robust discussions, he and Schiller decided to roll the dice on Palais Royal, “because Paris was the first real international stage we were trying to enter. We were also trying to grow up, in a way.”
Schiller joined Acne in the early 2000s, which makes Johansson the only original member of a brand for which, at the start, fashion was merely an afterthought. As Johansson recalls, it was something he fell into almost by chance. He was born in Ronneby, Sweden, in 1969 and raised in the town of Umeå, where he was thwarted on the cusp of achieving his first ambition to be a rock star. “I played guitar and sang. When I was about 19, my band was picked to represent Sweden in this competition sponsored by Yamaha, and we got to travel to Tokyo to play in Budokan,” he tells me. Later, the band was signed to CBS: while recording their first album, says Johansson, his bandmates kicked him out of the line-up.
