On the eve of Acne Studios’ Spring/Summer 2026 Paris fashion week runway show, the 13th-century Collège des Bernardins, once a monument to tradition, shed its veneer of historic prejudice, revealing a queer fantasy. Inside the ancient space, artist Pacifico Silano moved his artwork, based on photography and printed ephemera, across panels of dark wood, rearranging them ad nauseam until something clicked. “I’m very particular about installations,” he said. “So the night before the show, I was literally moving pieces around until midnight to find the perfect balance between rougher, more confrontational images, and the quieter, more intimate ones.” 

Courtesy of Acne Studios

The next day, beneath vaulted Gothic ceilings, Silano’s sought balance disclosed itself in full. Inside the Gothic arches of the former monastery, Acne Studios conjured a smoky cigar salon for its Paris runway. It was an atmosphere steeped in contradictions: sacred yet carnal, restricted yet vulnerable. Silano’s images, created from repurposed queer archives, became the emotional heartbeat weaving through the show. 

Courtesy of Acne Studios

“Showing in that space was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says. “There’s a real link between religious reliquaries and the way photographs can be fetishized. I’ve also long dreamed of installing my work against 1970s dark wood paneling. This show felt like a convergence of all those ideas.” 

Courtesy of Acne Studios

In Silano’s practice, nostalgia, desire, and loss often coexist in quiet tension. His work’s sensibility found an unexpected mirror in Acne Studios’ world, where fabric itself carries memory. “Fashion always lives in two places at once: the past and the future,” he says. “That mirrors the way I approach my work, too. The Acne team managed to honor my practice while opening up new readings of it.” 

For an artist whose medium revolves around challenging the once fixed notion of an image’s permanence, collaborating with a fashion house introduced a new, yet not unfamiliar rhythm, one defined by movement, ephemerality, and reinvention. “I always talk about the infinite life of a photograph – its meaning isn’t fixed, it keeps shifting,” Silano says. “I often reuse the same source image in multiple works to complicate its reading. This collaboration became another layer in that process, another way of extending the photograph’s life.” Silano’s most intimate works, an image of an eye, folded into Acne’s collection. “It was emotional and surreal,” he says. “The photograph….is one of my most personal works….I made it in 2019, and I’m constantly amazed by the lives it’s lived since.” 

Courtesy of Acne Studios

Acne’s collection this season presented a reshaped identity, one unbound to gender norms, where the traditional codes of menswear and womenswear were utterly deserted. A cocktail of broad-shoulder blazers, baggy straight-leg leather trousers, and hip-accentuating dresses, mingling on the runway with garments of delicate lace, forms a study in the fluidity of binaries. Interlaced with Silano’s representations of queer bodies, the show became a kind of sacrament, an intimate merging of fashion’s binaries into something newly flowing and whole. 

Courtesy of Acne Studios

As the models walked beneath centuries-old stone dressed in binary blurring attire, Silano’s imagery expanded beyond the confines of the gallery and into a broader cultural conversation. “My work has always been deeply personal, but it also speaks to larger histories of queer life and desire,” he says. “Partnering with Acne Studios gave those ideas a bigger stage. That kind of visibility feels powerful because it connects individual memory to a collective conversation.” 

In that sacred Parisian space, for a moment, the past in its newly shaped form walked and stood guard along the boarder of the runway. “This collaboration opened my eyes to how fluidly my work can exist outside the white walls of a gallery,” Siliano says. “It excites me to imagine future projects where art and fashion, or other cultural forms, blur in unexpected ways.”