Acne Studios x Chalayan Patchworks Its 1996 Jeans

Acne Studios and Hussein Chalayan released a 12 piece capsule this week that rebuilds three of Chalayan's early 2000s collections in denim, jersey and leather. It is sold at acnestudios.com and in select Acne Studios stores, with a limited edition book, Reference: Hussein Chalayan, published alongside it. The match is less random than it looks. Chalayan's 1999 Echoform collection already reproduced the classic denim jacket in several altered forms, and Acne Studios, founded in Stockholm in 1996, built its name on denim.

Ventriloquy, Medea, Manifest Destiny: Three Shows, Twelve Pieces

The capsule draws on three Chalayan shows: Spring/Summer 2001 Ventriloquy, Spring/Summer 2002 Medea and Spring/Summer 2003 Manifest Destiny. Acne Studios co founder and creative director Jonny Johansson worked with Chalayan on the range, which runs through denim, jersey and leather.

An asymmetrical vest and dress carry the layered construction of Manifest Destiny, and jersey T shirts and vests round out the clothing. Layered construction is the idea Acne Studios puts at the center of the whole collection, and it describes a denim jacket as well as it describes a dress. The bag is a reworked Camero in patchworked leather, dyed in denim inspired hues.

Acne's 1996 and 2009 Jeans Get Cut Up and Sewn Back

Two of Acne Studios' own jean styles, the 1996 and the 2009, return in patchworked versions, and a new twisted style carries a trompe l'oeil python print. The python is printed to look like skin, which is a Chalayan move: the garment pretends to be something it is not, and the construction gives it away.

Chalayan has cut jeans before. In 2012 the Turkish denim brand Mavi launched its first designer collaboration with him, a capsule of women's jeans. Fourteen years on, the denim comes from the other direction: Acne Studios is working from his archive instead of a fresh design brief.

The pairing also sits opposite a denim purist's instinct. A.P.C. has sold untreated raw denim since 1987, cloth left alone on purpose. This capsule takes cloth and cuts it into panels. Acne Studios marked its 30th anniversary in early September 2026 with a Nan Goldin campaign that put denim, the material the house started with, at the center, so the Chalayan capsule is the second big denim statement from Stockholm in about six weeks.

It is also part of a cluster. A.P.C.'s Fall Winter 2026 Heritage in Motion image puts denim and dark tops on the edge of a white bed, and Stone Island sent denim into its own autumn campaign. In four weeks, three houses with three different ideas of what jeans are for have each put them in front.

The V&A East Storehouse Put Jeans Beside a Tulle Dress

The campaign was shot at the V&A East Storehouse in London, with the new pieces photographed next to Chalayan archive items including the 2011 Tulle Dress and the Haiku Dress. Acne Studios calls the Storehouse "a radical space dedicated to preserving art, design and fashion, where design history is held and Chalayan's legacy feels entirely at home."

Putting a patchworked pair of jeans next to a 2011 tulle dress makes the argument without a caption: both are garments built from layers, one in cloth that frays and one in cloth that floats. The credits read like a small film crew. Heikki Kaski photographed it, Rafa de Pazos directed, Paulina Piipponen did the set design, with artworks courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Kaski photographed Stone Island's Autumn Winter 2026 Community as a Form of Research campaign, where Stephen Graham wears a bonded rubberised leather coach jacket, and the campaign's denim answer is a 13.5oz lasered coach jacket. Two houses with very different ideas about denim are using one photographer to say it, and both campaigns landed in the same four weeks.

A Book Capped at 1,000 Copies and a Store List

Reference: Hussein Chalayan is a limited edition Acne Studios publication with archival illustrations, photography and texts, editorially directed by curator and editor Charlene Prempeh. Selecta Bisso reports the book is capped at 1,000 copies.

The collection lands during Frieze London, and Numero dates the release to October 14. Selecta Bisso lists the select stores as Paris, Stockholm, London, New York and Tokyo, alongside acnestudios.com. Chalayan is a British Cypriot designer, and the capsule stays inside three shows from 2001 to 2003.