Acne Paper Palais Royal: Where Cult Fashion Takes Up (Very Tasteful) Residence.

Leave it to Acne Studios to turn a 17th-century arcade into the next frontier of cultural cool. On June 26, beneath the honeyed stone colonnades of Paris’s Palais Royal - that elegant playground of revolutionaries, royals, and roguish aesthetes - the Swedish fashion house will throw open the doors to its first-ever permanent gallery space: Acne Paper Palais Royal.

If you’re expecting a conventional white cube, think again. This is Acne, after all - the label that treats tailoring like sculpture and once put crumpled receipts on sweatshirts with the seriousness of couture. Acne Paper Palais Royal is less a gallery, more an intellectual salon disguised as a concept space, where art, design, photography, publishing, and fashion collapse into one another like well-dressed dominoes.

From Printed Page to Gilded Arcade

Part museum, part wild dinner party - where modernist legends rub elbows with Gen Z’s flashiest rebels, and that suspicious 16mm camera definitely knows your secrets.

Inspired by Acne Paper - the brand’s cult magazine that’s one part art tome, one part manifesto, and entirely too chic to ever lie flat - the new space is an architectural extension of Acne’s publishing psyche.

Think of it as the magazine having slipped off the page and into three dimensions, now sipping espresso across from the Palais Royal gardens and hosting book signings like they’re parties at Colette (RIP).

But unlike a museum frozen in reverence, Acne Paper Palais Royal promises a living, breathing, relentlessly stylish organism: a rotating program of exhibitions, talks, magazine launches, and bookish debauchery, mingling luminaries and upstarts in equal measure.

From modernist titans to Gen Z’s most photogenic disruptors, the curation reads like a dinner party with the most impossibly tasteful guest list imaginable - and yes, there’s probably a performance artist in the corner filming it all on 16mm.

Paul Kooiker, Please Take the First Bow

Who knew voyeurism could be this artful?

The debut show waltzes in on the irrepressible Dutch provocateur Paul Kooiker, a master of that tantalizing twilight where fetish flirts outrageously with fine art. His images tease and torment, dangling you between discomfort and seduction like a dangerously delicious riddle.

Cloaked in anonymity and dripping with voyeuristic charm, Kooiker’s work demands not just a second glance - but a guilty one, too - leaving you wondering if you’ve stumbled into a secret you weren’t quite meant to see.

Perfectly mischievous for a gallery that’s not just about looking, but about questioning the very nature of image, identity, and our magnetic obsession with that flawless, shadowy spotlight.

The Swedish Infiltration of Parisian Cool

That a Stockholm-based label has embedded itself so seamlessly in Paris’s gilded creative scene speaks volumes. Acne Studios has long blurred the line between fashion label and cultural entity - here, it’s not just producing clothes, but staging a conversation. A monologue in mohair, perhaps. Or a sonnet in selvedge denim. And now, with its name etched in the architectural bones of the Palais Royal, Acne has gone from chic outsider to cultural landlord.

It’s a bold move - opening a permanent gallery in the city of real galleries - but then again, Acne has never trafficked in the expected. Where others might open another flagship or café (bless), they’ve gone for a temple of taste with a publishing pedigree. The kind of place where a silk scarf might discuss semiotics with a ceramicist over a flute of something niche.

A Gallery With a Wardrobe (and a Worldview)

Ultimately, Acne Paper Palais Royal is not just about art. It’s about context - the stories that wrap around clothes, the images that haunt our feeds, the ways we consume culture not just visually, but emotionally. It’s for the kind of person who wants to see a fashion campaign and a conceptual video installation in the same afternoon - and discuss both over natural wine.

So yes, go for the Paul Kooiker. Stay for the curation, the conversation, and the quiet thrill of knowing that somewhere beneath those Parisian arches, culture just got a wardrobe change.

And if you happen to wander in wearing Acne from head to toe? Consider it camouflage. After all, this isn’t just a gallery. It’s a state of mind.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Acne / Paul Kooiker.