Acne Studios

Acne Studios Seoul brings the Stockholm house's full retail vocabulary to South Korea, occupying flagship space in Cheongdam-dong's luxury corridor and a Hannam-dong showroom that doubles as an exhibition venue for the brand's ongoing collaboration with Korean visual artists. The store carries Acne's full ready-to-wear, denim, leather goods, and Acne Studios Bla Konst denim line, plus Korea-exclusive releases that tap regional artists for graphic capsules. The Seoul presence matters because Acne—founded in 1996 by Jonny Johansson, originally as one of four creative arms of a Stockholm collective—has always treated each flagship as a gallery first and a shop second. The Seoul rooms apply the same pink-and-concrete material vocabulary as Paris and London, but install Korean-commissioned sculpture and light installations that rotate seasonally. The result is a retail environment that reads more like a Hannam-dong art space than a luxury department concession, which is exactly the calibration that the brand's Korean clientele—heavily skewed toward fashion-industry buyers, K-pop stylists, and the post-2018 wave of Korean luxury collectors—expects. Product-wise, the Seoul flagship leans heavier on Acne's tailoring and ready-to-wear archive than the brand's average global door, reflecting Korean buying patterns that favor blazers, wide-leg trousers, and the brand's signature scarves over the denim that anchors American and Scandinavian stores. The Acne Paper magazine—the brand's biannual print object curated by Thomas Persson—is also distributed through Seoul retail, often paired with Korean-artist conversation issues that don't appear in other markets. Acne's Seoul presence has, since the late 2010s, helped establish the broader template for how European luxury houses approach Korea: lean creative footprint, art-adjacent retail, and Korean-artist collaboration treated as core programming.