Acne's blue period

The Swedish fashion label has published a book surveying 61 of the Earl of Snowdon’s portraits. The subject of every portrait, from Yves Saint Laurent to David Bowie, via Manolo Blahnik, wears a shirt falling into the photographer's preferred range of blues.

‘The blue shirt is anonymous and yet kind of a uniform,’ Snowdon said. ‘It is like a simple backdrop that leaves us to focus on the sitter’s face without being distracted.’

Taking cues from the portraits, Acne designers also created a limited-edition range of eight blue, unisex shirts. Many of the shirts seen in the portraits, it happens, are based on garments from Snowden’s own dressing-up box—the photographer regularly re-dresses his sitters in a shirt in his favourite hue.

‘Snowdon’s portraits have a human sincerity, combined here with beautiful blue shades, which was inspirational for the project,’ Acne founder Jonny Johansson said.

An accompanying exhibition of the photographs opens tonight at Acne’s Dover Street store before moving on to Paris, New York and Stockholm.

Let the Snowdon-inspired blue-shirt shoots begin...