Presumably to the chagrin of its fashion-forward rivals, Acne Studios enjoys a viral hit every other month. The Acne scarf, the Kylie Jenner cosign, the surprise K-Pop ambassadors, the warped handbags: Acne Studios is as close as fashion gets to a hit parade.
Sometimes, Acne doesn't even have to do anything to rake in attention.
Its football-inspired and plainly-named "Logo Long Sleeve T-shirt" is luring lots of love online... again. And all it ever did was exist, no promotion required.
How did Acne get the $500 football shirt so right?
What makes this thing so covetable that, even a year after it was revealed at the seasonal Acne showroom, it continues to notch fans' fawning admiration?
It must first be said that, before we got here, before the $500 football shirt, Acne Studios was already perhaps the ultimate football-fashion brand.
For at least the better part of a decade, Acne's football fandom bled deeply into its ready-to-wear collections.
There's the small stuff — the football-inspired scarves and football jersey tops that every clothing labels ever has long since tackled — and even the extremely on-the-nose "Fotbollsklubb" capsule from 2018 that yielded, yes, football club-inspired clothes.
And, then, there's the the stuff for the heads.
Like last year, when Acne subtly channeled Nike's Total 90 II football boot, described by footie fans as a particularly "infamous" cleat, with a retooled Bolzter sneaker.
And even prior to that, one Acne shoe took literal inspiration from football, as in the ball that's kicked with a foot.
Even back in 2015, Acne was citing football as a key inspiration.
This is no fluke.
Whereas, until recently most of luxury only barely flirted with the game that we Yanks call soccer, Acne grew up immersed in the sport ("Spending time with my sons, attending their football training; that is real luxury," co-founder Jonny Johansson once said).
As such, its contemporary football references are rooted in a place of deep passion. These Swedes love soccer. Er, football. And their clothes show it.
Which brings us back to Acne's $500 football shirt.
It's not just a jersey with some Acne branding, for one. I mean, it is, but it's more than that.
Look at how ordinary Acne's "Fotbollsklubb" wearables were and look now at where we are. This is design with a voice and it's born of purposeful choices with potent impact.
Stylized graphic prints both arcane and obvious; no-nonsense XXXL branding on the rear; a subtle trompe l'oeil tuck at the neck; tasteful pink and white stripes soften a conventionally masculine, sporty garment.
Do these factors alone justify five hundred clams? Your call. But this is the sort of layered design that subconsciously stirs desire, especially among late-adolescent Acne adherents.
To study Acne's $500 football shirt is to explore why Acne is so tremendously popular with these young shoppers. The brand has a real mastery of the sort of everyday statement pieces that fit their stylistic ideals: vibrant, easy, timely, genderfluid.
The shirt is a canny flip of a classic, plenty familiar and plenty wearable but also thoughtfully and unobtrusively refreshed.
In an era where football style is nearly as important as football itself and genuinely stylish footballers in fairly short supply, it's up to third-party designers like Acne to force out football's latent stylishness by gently, resolvedly bending the medium's design cues.
Bending it like Beckham, even.
