While the band never really got anywhere, his rejection from it was a blow. Licking his wounds, Johansson moved to Stockholm in search of success — “I wanted to get revenge” — and began work in a clothing store. One day, he was spotted by promoter Balthazar Silveira, who thought Johansson looked cool, and invited him to his club in the city. It was there he first encountered some of the other core personnel — Mats Johansson, Jesper Kouthoofd and Tomas Skoging — with whom he would found ACNE, in its original all-caps form. This was 1996.

The original ACNE was a sort of agency-cum-multidiscipliary creative collective. The name was an acronym for ‘Associated Computer Nerd Enterprises’. “Everybody was sitting behind a computer; it was 1996. They wanted to be on top of fashion, and they asked me to be on top of that because they thought I was fashionable. We did consultancies, for H&M, and a golf brand. I did showrooms, shoots, record sleeves. They almost sacked me at one point because they were putting so much money into my fashion thing and it was contributing so little. Luckily, I had some money in the bank, and they asked me if I would like to invest,” Johansson recalls.

This was the point at which ACNE stumbled onto the path that would define its destiny. Johansson created 100 pairs of red-stitched jeans as a sort of organic marketing hustle: the idea was to give them away to friends and family. The Italian factory he first approached declined such a tiny order, so Johansson went local. “Those first pairs were made in Sweden. One pocket was lower than the other because they did not have the denim machines,” he reveals. And yet, the jeans caught the attention of French Vogue, which featured them. “We had one of the guys from Devo wearing our jeans which we thought was so cool, and Iggy Pop, too.”

One day, editor Tyler Brûlé passed the first-floor ACNE office-slash-store in Stockholm, and asked his assistant to ring the bell and ask what was going on. “We had this idea that everything should be touched by us, drawn by us, made by us. So we got a big spread in Wallpaper*, which was significant also,” tells Johansson.