Acne Studios' "Face" design has been a recurring motif for a minute now. Consisting of just two dots and a line, like the classic :| emoticon people used back in the days of MSN and dial-up internet, the mascot has made its way onto all sorts of Acne products over the past few seasons.
Acne's creative director, Jonny Johannson, was thinking about family for FW17, and so the Swedish powerhouse produced a campaign featuring Instagram-famous same-sex couple Kordale Lewis and Kaleb Anthony. Unsurprisingly, the face joined the family too — it made its way onto Acne's scarves, beanies, hoodies and cardigans.
Jonny was kind enough to take the time to explain the story behind Acne's charmingly deadpan mascot.
"We were doing a fitting for a show and we didn’t have a bag—you always have to have a bag when you do a show. So I took a piece of paper and I drew this Swedish guy. Instead of a smiley, I drew a square face from a straight line and two dots for eyes."
"And that’s how it came to be, just an ordinary Swedish citizen. Not too happy, not too sad, but somewhere in between. Lagom in Swedish. Since then he appeared on other things and became bigger and bigger in the collections, and rather than let it get out of hand, I thought he has to officially belong in the Acne family; I started thinking about what family means to me, and what is important within families."
"I was thinking about my own family and how at one point in our family history we were all dressing the same as one another. From there I started thinking about what the modern family is today, which is how the concept came up."
Check out Acne Studios' FW17 campaign while you're at it.
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