In recent years, Our Legacy has become something of a fixture of London’s fashion landscape, joining the long line (or legacy, you could say!) of Swedish import brands earning cultish fan bases among the city’s style set. What has singled the brand out, though, has been its idiosyncratic aesthetic – a world apart from the svelte yet safe Scandi chic. Rather, Our Legacy has always had a grit to it; an almost grungy flair, elevated by painstaking attention to detail when it comes to cut, fit and material choice and development.
It’s been a decade since Our Legacy first set up shop in the British capital, with its store in Soho’s Silver Place serving as something of a pilgrimage site for the brand’s loyal customers. The run-up has brought with it a series of major happenings in town, such as the opening of a pop-up shop at Harrods – a testament to the brand’s luxury kudos. The most significant pledge of Our Legacy’s love for London will come next week, though, when the brand will cut the ribbon to a Soho space dedicated to Work Shop – Our Legacy’s laboratory for circular fashion practice and innovative collaboration, which celebrates its 10th birthday next year.
Our Legacy Work Shop London. Photography Nick Dunne
Our Legacy Work Shop London. Photography Nick Dunne
“From the very beginning, Cristopher [Nying] and I have always been very fond of London,” says Jockum Hallin, Our Legacy’s co-founder (along with Nying) and creative director of Our Legacy Work Shop. “Whether it’s with respect to pop culture, subculture, food, art, sports… in so many areas, it feels like there’s a spark coming from the city.”
That admiration was soon reciprocated when the brand first started appearing in retailers across town upon the brand’s launch two decades ago. “It’s one of the places that we gained traction in very early on. Many inspirational buyers were buying us for completely different reasons, and would do their own things with the line,” an approach that holds true to this day – the offering you’ll find in Harrods, for example, feels pretty different to what you’ll see on the rails at Dover Street Market. “Over the years, we’ve built a great following, a great network and a great community here.”
It was therefore a no-brainer for Hallin to make the city the first beyond its Stockholm base to host a standalone space for Work Shop. Initially founded as a solution for an issue that all fashion brands inevitably face, “it really started as a means to work with all the residual materials that Our Legacy creates as a whole,” Jockum explains, referring to both garments that remain on the rails at the end of a season’s run, and the rolls of fabrics that had amassed in their warehouses in Portugal, where the lion’s share of the brand’s garments are produced.
Our Legacy Work Shop x Converse. Photography Ian Kenneth Bird
Our Legacy Work Shop x Converse. Photography Ian Kenneth Bird
“We were asking ourselves, ‘How do we make something good out of this?’ We can’t just let these beautiful things just sit there, or, worse, discard them,” Hallin says. “After all, at its core, fabrics are at the core of what we do. We’re really into developing our own, and also finding real golden nuggets out there, from England, Japan, Italy, which we then bring into the collections.”