These Jeans Are an Illusion. Their Omnipresence Is Not
Six different belts haphazardly slung atop each other, fat rips across both knees, and two layers of thick denim over each leg: This $800 pair of Acne Studios trousers sound like a nightmare to wear. And maybe they would be, were they not a clever illusion.
The Swedish fashion house specializes in creating strikingly realistic prints that give its otherwise ordinary jeans the appearance of something wildly over-decorated.
They're quite tame, despite their wild appearance. Like, how many people would actually suit up in what looks like two pairs of jeans layered above each other, every square inch either destroyed or laden with thick doodles?
But plenty of people could slip on some conventional denim dressed up ih all that detailing.
And they're popular too: In a recent Acne Studios campaign, Charli XCX is clad in a pair of pants that appear to be splattered with a canvas’ worth of paint. Not so!
Spurred by the surprise virality of last year’s keychain-covered jeans — which, despite being restocked in two different cuts, remain fully sold out on the brand's website — Acne Studios is going deep on trompe-l'œil denim.
At a time when fashion is festooning everything with micro accessories, there’s something novel about unadorned pants covered in faux trinkets.
Acne’s “excessively accessorised” denim is of course only the latest hit trompe-l'œil trouser. Not that long ago, Bottega Veneta played a similar trick by turning real leather into faux denim.
And, while Acne has perfected its premise, other labels are still experimenting.
Our Legacy dabbles in“distressed” jeans, Anderson Bell has “Patchworked” pants, and CAMPERLAB does “distorted” faded denim. You can’t trust anything you put on your legs these days.
There’s a history of deceiving denim harking back to the ‘90s, when pioneers like Jean Paul Gaultier printed jeans atop of jeans and Martin Margiela faked iron marks on his denim trousers.
But those examples were comparatively tame in terms of tricking the eye whereas today, limits are pushed less by a desire to deceive than by advancements in technology and taste.
Acne’s (faux) distressing and accessorizing is the most expressive of the modern lot, aggressively juxtaposing the real with the expressive.
The appeal, maybe, is that these un-lived-in jeans revel in their fakeness. The proposal is similar to any other pre-distressed or pre-faded denim but the execution is more radical.
And dare I say, better.
Acne just knows how to cut a great pair of jeans, with or without prints.
When I was first introduced to Acne Studios, it was because many considered the brand’s slim-fitting jeans the best in the game. Fast forward a decade, and the brand is peerless in the market of baggy-fitting jeans rich with OTT faux accents.
Times change, trends change, but Acne’s denim game remains untouchable.
