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The creative director is asleep on the couch. His vintage Margiela boots are on the floor beside him. It’s not yet noon but it’s already been a big day for Cristopher Nying. And an even bigger week. This whole year, in fact, and the couple preceding it, have been quite big for Nying and his partners at Our Legacy.
It’s November in Stockholm. The sun sets around 3 p.m. and the clouds hang low and dense, like a thick layer of wool. The nights are long. Last night especially. It started with a party at the Our Legacy Work Shop store—one of two boutiques the company operates in Stockholm—to celebrate the brand’s latest blockbuster collaboration, with Emporio Armani. Nying and his partners, Jockum Hallin, with whom he cofounded Our Legacy in 2005, and Richardos Klarén, who joined the business a couple years later, hosted a very cool soiree of what I can only assume are the most stylish people in all of Sweden. A crew of young chefs passed around veal tartare and glasses of natural wine while friends, relatives, and fans got a first look at the goods. After that, a family dinner at Bord, a favorite Stockholm restaurant, which served mountains of wood-fired langoustines from the Baltic Sea and cold pilsner by the glass. Finally, a group congregated at an underground karaoke bar. When I tapped out for the night, Nying had just finished one of the most riveting performances I have ever seen—“Give It Away,” by the Chili Peppers, performed entirely as a freestyle.
Nying may be snoozing now, but he and Hallin and Klarén were up early this morning for a photo shoot with a Swedish newspaper. When they returned, they began the final stages of running through the next men’s collection with the design team. “It’s a very important, very critical moment,” Nying will tell me later. Hallin, who heads up Our Legacy’s collaborations, has just dropped the first online teaser for the Armani collection and is trying to keep up with his endlessly buzzing phone. Today’s release is already producing the most social media engagement the brand has ever seen. But it’s not unexpected: These days, an Our Legacy collab is as hot as anything a streetwear or sneaker brand can cook up. In a few days, Hallin will be off to London, then Tokyo, to launch the collection with Dover Street Market, which is carrying it exclusively.
While Nying sleeps, the Our Legacy studio, a converted parking garage where about 30 full-time employees work, is awake with a kind of ebullient chaos. In the few days I got to spend observing the operation, it was obvious that this is not your stereotypical oppressed and overworked fashion concern. The vibes are strong. Business is booming. The brand is thriving, both in terms of sales and cultural impact. For a company that’s been in business for nearly 20 years, the future is suddenly blindingly bright.
After surviving the trend cycles and economic uncertainties that sank so many menswear labels, Our Legacy has somehow turned the past two years into the busiest and most profitable of its history. According to the brand, its business has tripled in size since 2020—and is projected to reach $40 million in the first half of 2024. Since expanding into womenswear in 2018, Our Legacy now produces four primary collections each year—two for men, two for women. In addition, Our Legacy has a thriving Work Shop program, captained by Hallin, which produces off-schedule special collections—capsules made using deadstock fabrics, and collaborations with brands like Stüssy, Denim Tears, and Satisfy Running—that have reliably become mega-hype events. Our Legacy has permanent stores in Stockholm, London, and Berlin, plus a few outposts in Korea, and over 250 stockists globally.
But why the explosion now? Why would a beloved brand suddenly catch fire? For years, Our Legacy occupied a comfortable niche as a consistent and reasonably priced menswear brand. It enjoyed a cult following among guys who like their clothes to be interesting and well-made, without any bold logos or big statements, and without wreaking havoc on their bank accounts. Our Legacy has always been cool in the way that any good, under-hyped thing is—benefiting from a certain if-you-know-you-know factor, while making understated clothes that just about anyone can wear. Along the way, the brand became more experimental. It began to push against the confines of conventional menswear—introducing that women’s line and producing clothes that blurred gender norms. Still, it held onto its niche position and catered to the shifting desires of its followers, who could rely on Our Legacy to make easy, accessible, wearable clothes that feel like they reflect the moment.
But now there is no road map for what Our Legacy faces, no tried-and-true example of a cult menswear brand entering its second decade suddenly facing the possibility—the necessity—to expand like never before. What happens when an adored, under-the-radar label bursts beyond the beloved-niche bubble that has safely ensconced it for years? Our Legacy is entering uncharted territory.
The Our Legacy HQ is divided in half by a long curtain. On one side sits the sales and marketing teams. On the other is design and production. There are clothes everywhere you look. Racks of samples and prototypes run the length of the dividing curtain. In one corner of the design side, there is a proper sewing room, where samples can be developed and retooled as the design work is happening.
During my time at the studio, a Swiss-based consultant named Luigi Bernasconi paid an important visit. Bernasconi is a merchandising ringer—a specialist with a unique combination of skills in design, production, and marketing that he uses to help supercharge the efficiency of fashion brands. He lives in Lugano but spends his time in Paris and Milan and other fashion capitals, lending his expertise to companies like Bottega Veneta and Prada. Bernasconi has become a key figure in understanding the changing fortunes at Our Legacy.
Bernasconi’s work with the brand began in 2021 with an assessment. “I interviewed basically the entire company,” he says. “I spent an hour with each and every one of them and absolutely saw the potential, but I saw that it was purely, entirely creativity driven. Which is great. So the need was really to set up process and give structure to the product offering, and this is exactly what I do: optimize the product offering in order to basically turn creativity into profit.”
Nying is very hands on as a designer. The first step in making any Our Legacy garment is often a sketch he draws in pen on paper. Bernasconi helps optimize the strategic process that turns that sketch into a finished product. Twice a year, he meets with menswear designers Johannes Wieser and Harry Peter to run through every detail of every garment, discussing fabric treatments and fit, color, and texture; they look carefully at zippers, hoods, collars and cuffs, scrutinizing every conceivable component, then assess the price accordingly. “The product gets so analyzed now,” Nying tells me. “Which is very good. I like that, to turn it inside out so many times, and when it finally hits the floor, it will be very rare that something is wrong.”
Price is an important part of the Our Legacy business. Fans of the brand and experts in the industry alike will tell you that what makes Our Legacy so great is the value. Which is interesting considering the brand sells shirts for $300, sweaters for $500, and pants for $400. But in the high-fashion universe these prices are reasonable. In fact, for a brand with a reputation for excellence in design and quality like Our Legacy, these prices are more than reasonable. This was a crucial part of Bernasconi’s initial assessment. “That’s why they’re doing well these days, because you have the creativity and you have the price point as well,” he says. “The price point is slightly lower than luxury. I hate to say affordable luxury, but this is what makes them really unique.”
Sweden’s famous reputation for minimalism has led to some confusion about whether Our Legacy is a minimalist brand. But there’s nothing minimal about Our Legacy’s trompe l’oeil jeans and massive, shaggy crocheted sweaters. These clothes bring to mind a different era in Swedish design, an early-20th-century period called Swedish grace, characterized by an ornate and opulent neoclassicism. The way Our Legacy uses texture, pattern and prints, surprising fabric treatments and elegant shapes, has more to do with this period of Swedish design heritage than with the restraint of a midcentury aesthetic. And it’s the wilder stuff that really shines in Our Legacy collections—wild, but still, always wearable, cool, and easy.
“Their way of approaching fashion is truly unique,” Bernasconi says. “People talk about quiet luxury—Loro Piana or Brunello Cucinelli. This is something totally different but that is also quiet. It’s more like quiet fashion. It’s that sensibility for people that want to dress in a way that is unique and is obviously more punk but still subtle, still quiet.”
Quiet though it may be, the sensibility of the brand is always apparent to its fans. There is a vague air of nostalgia for the ’90s, and a spiritual kinship with the countercultures that defined the era—skateboarding and surfing, punk and hardcore, hip-hop and streetwear. In general, the clothes have a vintage, eternal quality to them, and a very signature mix of American and European influences.
“Honestly, it has such a wide appeal,” Rikesh Patel, a buyer at Dover Street Market, tells me. “It’s super eclectic, the whole range.” He says the ’90s vibes and the “punk boardroom” aesthetic are really resonating with millennial fashion shoppers right now. Yet what Our Legacy has really gotten right in recent years is offering the perfect kind of attire for the post-COVID moment. “They nailed that relaxed formal dressing,” Patel says.
But the most appealing thing about Our Legacy is something intangible. There’s an intriguing quality to the brand. It’s both anonymous and very personal. It feels like a discovery. Like a book or a film you found and loved unexpectedly, for reasons that you can’t quite describe. Even the name is enigmatic and evocative, like the title of an album. And as big as the brand is, it still feels small in the best possible way. Considered, through and through, but not in a commercially driven way.
“Everything they do is super authentic,” Patel says. “They are a huge family and you can feel that from the team they employ to the product they make. If they do something it’s because it’s at the heart of who they are. That’s what trumps all else; you can really feel it.”
Nying and Hallin met on the ice. They played on the same hockey team as kids, starting when they were 12 and 13, respectively, living around Jönköping, not far from Huskvarna, a small industrial spot in the southern part of Sweden that’s famous for making chain saws and dirt bikes. Nying’s family had a vinyl business—which would eventually become useful. But it took a few years for their friendship to form outside the rink. The two ventured beyond Sweden—Hallin spent a season snowboarding in Austria, Nying studied art in Australia—before returning to Sweden and meeting again, finding they’d developed shared interests, particularly in clothes. They decided to try their hand at design, and in 2005 they released a collection of T-shirts using Nying’s family’s vinyl printing equipment to make samples.
“We developed the quality fast and then when we picked up speed, we just learned garment category by category,” says Hallin.
For a couple years they drove around Scandinavia with a duffel bag full of T-shirts and sold to stores directly.
“We had one or two stores in Copenhagen, the best ones in Stockholm, the best ones in Gothenburg, not so much more than that,” Hallin says. And they had grown to the point where it made sense to bring on a third partner. Richardos Klarén joined in 2007. He’d been working in sales at Stockholm-based Acne Studios, and brought a new level of industry savvy to the budding operation. By 2007, Our Legacy was a complete collection. Or something like that. They had shirting and knitwear, a washed blazer. Enough that the three felt ready to make one of their first big investments—to take their brand to a trade show in Copenhagen. That turned out to be a good idea.
“We were saying something different,” Hallin says. “The menswear at the time was very Dior Homme, Cheap Monday—skinny black jeans, rock and roll—and we came with oxfords, plaids, color, rolled-up chinos, and a wider silhouette. It wasn’t just another Swedish rock-and-roll brand.”
Our Legacy’s early success wasn’t only in finding its way out of skinny jeans and zip-up hoodies. All of menswear was just beginning to look toward a shiny new thing. The category was undergoing a pretty radical transformation, recovering from the ostentatious and materialistic style of the early aughts personified by David Beckham, shifting toward more traditional tropes, as personified by the Kennedys and lumberjacks. Our Legacy’s aesthetic at the time—“broken preppy,” some were calling it—fit in perfectly alongside other fashion brands capitalizing on the heritage wave, primarily American-based ones, like Band of Outsiders, Patrik Ervell, and Engineered Garments. Our Legacy had the distinction of being well-made and well-priced, and having a somewhat enigmatic, European background. It referenced Martin Margiela as much as Ralph Lauren.
Only the pigeonhole Our Legacy found itself in didn’t quite fit its ambitions. It cruised through the first few years on the heritage wave, building a following among guys who might have otherwise been shopping at J.Crew, then somewhat abruptly decided to pivot.
“I felt we had so much more to give,” says Nying.
“So much more to explore,” adds Hallin. “It came to a point we could do so much more in terms of aesthetics, in terms of inspiration, we can blend more worlds.”
By the mid-2010s, men’s fashion had exploded into a wild-style era that embraced pattern and texture and color and exaggerated shapes like never before. Our Legacy was just one step ahead of this natural progression. Hallin says the big shift came when they realized they did not have to accept all of menswear’s conventions. They recognized that they might lose a few of their existing customers, guys who weren’t ready for transparent silk shirts. For every one of those they lost, they picked up a few new ones.
“I don’t actually know how we got through that period, but we did,” Klarén says. “Now I think we have a very unique position. ”
When the pandemic closed in, Our Legacy swiftly downsized and braced for devastating economic impact. Then when sales started to pick up—thanks in part to the newly launched Our Legacy x Stüssy collaboration—Nying, Hallin, and Klarén recognized it as an opportunity. “In those moments, the playing field becomes a little bit more open,” says Hallin. “It’s easier to operate. It’s not like we think about, ‘Okay. Let’s take some market share.’ But it’s more like we can establish a little-bit bigger footprint in the market when these things happen, because we have our thing.”
Back at the studio, the big, bright future for Our Legacy is already underway. New stores are a priority: Milan, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Shanghai are all under consideration. And the women’s collection is about to undergo a major overhaul. But the three partners are still figuring out what it will mean for Our Legacy to be a major player on the global fashion stage.
“We’ve been a quite small brand for a long time,” says Klarén. “Now we’ve grown into a brand that you can count on. The momentum is with us now and we’re doing well brand-wise but also financially, which makes it possible to put the foot on the gas.”
For Our Legacy, putting the foot on the gas probably won’t mean what it might for other, more opportunistic fashion brands. “We treat our brand very carefully,” says Hallin, recalling that when he was coming up, selling out was the worst thing that a band or an artist could do. “That’s not a thing anymore. Growth and success are what’s being worshipped.” So as fast as Our Legacy sells out of Work Shop hoodies, don’t expect it to respond to changing tides of market demand as quickly. (But do expect more surprising, high-profile projects—like an upcoming furniture collaboration with Willo Perron on his shape-shifting Sausage Sofa.)
Nying’s plans for the future of the brand? “For me, it’s just to elevate the stuff we’re doing. Maybe it’s cliché,” he says, “but I really care about the product.”
Noah Johnson is GQ’s global style director.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of GQ with the title “How Our Legacy Became the Biggest Little Fashion Brand in the World”
