Our Legacy: Stockholm, and the fabric first

Our Legacy has never staged a runway show. In twenty years it has built one of Europe's most quietly influential labels without one, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the house thinks.

Two friends and a T-shirt project

Jockum Hallin and Cristopher Nying grew up in Jönköping, lost touch for most of a decade, and reconnected in their mid-twenties. Both came from graphic design. In 2005 they started Our Legacy in Stockholm as a graphic T-shirt project — not a fashion house, a side thing. Richardos Kláren joined shortly after and took on the business side.

The T-shirts turned into shirts, then trousers, then outerwear, and the side project became a full menswear label almost by accident. Womenswear followed in 2018. The first standalone store opened in Stockholm in 2010; the business now turns over around forty million euros, still independent.

Form follows fabric

The thing that separates Our Legacy from every other Scandinavian minimalist label is that the design does not start with a silhouette. It starts with a cloth.

The house develops fabrics custom with mills rather than ordering from a standard book, and then finds the shape that the fabric wants to make. That is backwards from how most brands work, and it explains why an Our Legacy shirt feels different in the hand before you have registered anything about the cut.

The house describes its territory as the junction between the familiar and the irregular, which is exactly right. A Box shirt is recognisably a shirt. The proportion is off by an amount you cannot immediately name. Denim comes in cuts that reference workwear and then sit somewhere workwear never sat. Nothing is difficult to wear; nothing is quite standard either.

There are no logos. The recognition is entirely in the making, which means the people who know, know, and everybody else sees a good shirt.

Work Shop

In 2016 the house launched Our Legacy Work Shop, a platform built on repurposing — leftover fabric, deadstock, existing garments taken apart and rebuilt. It releases in limited drops rather than seasons.

What makes it interesting is that it is not a sustainability gesture bolted onto the main line. It functions as the creative engine, and it has become the vessel for the house's collaborations: Stüssy, Converse, Emporio Armani, and Artek, the Finnish furniture company founded by Alvar Aalto. That last one is a good indication of how the house sees itself.

Buying it

Denim is the anchor and the cuts are named rather than numbered — learn the two or three that suit you and the rest becomes easy. The raw and rigid washes will move considerably with wear; that is the point.

Shirting runs relaxed through the body with a shoulder that sits slightly wide. Take your normal size. The volume is deliberate and it collapses if you size up.

Outerwear is where the fabric development shows most clearly, and it is where the money is best spent. These are the pieces people still wear after five years.

At ANSH46

Our Legacy is one of the deepest collections in the store, weighted towards denim, shirting and outerwear. It sells to the customer who has stopped buying logos and started buying cloth — which, in our experience, is where most people end up eventually.

Browse Our Legacy at ANSH46, or see menswear and footwear.