The Woman Curating H&M’s Vast Multiverse

Like with any mass retailer today, the sheer volume available to shoppers at H&M can make anyone overwhelmed by choice. There are often many floors and countless clothes racks, and one room always seems to lead to another like an endless shopping maze. As the business has grown from a small Swedish fashion boutique—first opened in 1947—to a multinational retailer, the gargantuan amount of stuff available can make the shopping experience feel impersonal. 

Ann-Sofie Johansson, the company’s Creative Advisor and Head of Design, is trying to change that. Sitting in an office inside one of H&M’s many buildings in Stockholm, Johansson—wearing an oversized suit and star-shaped earrings from the retailer’s Mugler collaboration—tells InStyle: “Sometimes we just need a little bit of something that is more curated.”

Since 2012, Johansson and her team have built exactly that—a more fashion-forward and elevated label within H&M, called the Studio Collection. With four drops per year, it’s H&M’s version of a seasonal capsule wardrobe. Whereas the retailer’s main collections bring a varied assortment of anything under the current trend cycle (H&M sells everything from white T-shirts to gold metallic hot pants), the Studio Collection is all about making H&M “a little bit more personal.”

For fall 2024—available on September 26—that includes an array of outerwear, mini dresses, tailored suits, and cozy knits in a black, gray, and gold palette—all inspired by early-to-mid 20th century Jazz musicians and focused on the age-old idea of transforming your wardrobe staples from day to night. As Jonahsson walks us through the lineup at H&M’s creative studio in Stockholm, it’s clear the team is trying to build an entire universe with these collections—albeit a more edited one. Kicking off the tour, Johansson shows us photographs of famous Jazz musicians from the early-to-mid 20th century and a vintage trumpet lying on a table like a mood board straight out of Pinterest. “I think it is about building the totality of what H&M can do. It’s also a lot about building a story,” Johansson later tells me.

For Johansson, the Studio Collection—an initiative she started after leading the brand’s more curated press days in Paris—is what she always envisioned H&M could be, even as a teenager. 

Growing up in southern Sweden, Johansson remembers wearing clothes made by her mother. As a teenager, she traveled two hours to visit the store she believed to be “the coolest thing around”—H&M. “That was like a big treat for me,” she recalls, adding that she’d be allowed to buy one or two garments. Those trips were made in search of specific items she had fantasized about in her brain but had never really seen. 

“They could kind of read my mind in a way,” she says. “Everything I put my mind on that I wanted to have I was craving I could find it then.” It was those shopping trips that inspired her to work in design, but not just for any company. “The aspiration was to work as a designer at H&M,” she says. Johansson figured that with no real design training, she’d start working as a retail associate at one of the stores during the late 1980s. She put together a portfolio that managed to impress the company’s then-head of design, who gave Johansson a role as a designer assistant. Back then, she assisted a team of 15 people, a small number compared to today’s 300-person design crew. 

Working at a smaller company allowed Johansson and her team some privileges that are not possible within H&M’s current structure. They were able to work within the stores, talking to customers, and getting ideas directly from the floor. “Who is she? Who is he? You know, their needs and desires,” Johansson explains. It’s a mindset she still tries to embed in her team. However, with operations running in over 4,000 stores and a team of over 300 designers, it’s hard to work like they’re still a 15-person pack. Somehow, though, Johansson gets it done. There are little corners where H&M keeps its edited nostalgia, given the immense volume of merchandise it puts out The Studio Collection is one of them. And so are the brand’s famous designer collaborations, which Johansson spearheads. 

Since partnering with the late Karl Lagerfeld in 2015, H&M has worked with a long list of fashion designers merging the best of both worlds: the accessibility of mass retail and the creative force of high fashion. Names like Versace, Mugler, Comme des Garçons, Stella McCartney, and Roberto Cavalli have all participated in launching limited-edition collections. Not just anyone will do, though. “It has to be a designer or brand that we admire,” Johansson says. “We want to enter their universe and at the same time, keep it very much H&M.”

Today, designer collaborations with retailers are a given. Everyone, from Christopher John Rogers and Sergio Hudson to Studio Nicholson, has partnered with mass retailers like Zara and Target. But back in 2015, when H&M first approached Lagerfeld’s camp for a collaboration, a designer-retailer partnership was not as desirable for luxury labels and independent brands as it may be today. Not all fears have eased, though. “I think many designers are a little bit worried sometimes when I enter a collaboration with us,” Johansson admits. “But it’s usually a very fun and very creative process.”

After nearly four decades with H&M, Johansson’s impact on the retailer’s push for a more intentional shopping experience can’t be overstated. The Studio Collection’s highly-editorial visuals and thematic capsule wardrobe approach, for example, are elements that Johansson flexes as evidence that there’s more to H&M than basic white T-shirts. “We can really be more fashion-forward and be more experimental and innovative,” she says. “And put a spotlight and shine some light over our own design team.”