Our Legacy on What's Coming With Nike: "It's Gonna Look Slow but Feel Fast."
"We're here to start our journey with the biggest sports brand in the world," Our Legacy cofounder Jockum Hallin smilingly tells me on a beautiful autumn day in New York City. A few days prior, Our Legacy and Nike triumphantly announced their long-awaited partnership, rumors of which had been bouncing around the inner chambers of menswear for the past few years in the wake of OL's longstanding Converse collaboration.
People wanted Our Legacy x Nike because Our Legacy is, simply, the greatest brand in the world. It's luxury! It's unpretentious! It's wearable! It's actually interesting! It's the very epitome of good clothing, and bringing Our Legacy to Nike's scale is basically a guarantee of good stuff at a global scale.
"It's something that we'll do with Nike on multiple levels throughout our journey with them," Hallin tells me, wearing an upcycled Nike zip hoodie, "Silver Bullet" AM97s, and leather pants at secondhand store Procell. "We'll explore sport, so we're starting with, like, OG sportswear."
The Swedish label is popping up in NYC in time for the New York City Marathon on November 1, a fitting kick-off. But don't get it twisted: this is not part of Our Legacy's Nike collab. It is, instead, an activation at Procell powered by Nike.
"Procell is the king of sourcing archival stuff, they have everything," Hallin says, gesturing around at the racks packed with specially sourced retro Nike gear and designer bits that range from Prada Sport to COMME des GARÇONS, worthy design references for the Our Legacy Work Shop Sport items hanging from a perpendicular display. "It's cotton, it's natural fibers, it's not so much tech. We've done reworked stuff that you could wear every day all day."
Our Legacy Work Shop Sport is a wearable Russian nesting doll, an athletically inclinced sub-label within the already far-reaching Our Legacy Work Shop imprint that flits between Stüssy collabs, repurposed vintage, and incredibly good staples done better (better fabrics, better fits).
"It's about proportions, it's a palette so you can patch a fit together, something that feels familiar but we're also pushing it a bit," says Hallin, gesturing at the insanely good made-in-America hoodies Nike sourced for the pop-up, which Our Legacy overdyed, lined with waffle-knit jersey, and printed with imagery from its corresponding campaign. "If you wanna shave two seconds off your PB on race day, maybe we're not the choice. But for everyday training, you wanna look good and feel good."
Okay, so sport is part of Our Legacy's perfectly proportioned wardrobe. But where does Nike fit into the equation?
"Nike has the best technology, the resources do to whatever we wanna imagine," Hallin explains. "We wanna bring our aesthetic with the best tech. It's gonna look slow but when you put it on, it's going to feel fast.
If the Procell pop-up, with its vintage Nike grails and saucy Our Legacy sportswear, is any indication of what's to come, expect a very analog approach to running gear. Our Legacy shapes, Nike utility.
"It's gonna look slow, but it's when you put it on, it's gonna feel fast," Hallin says. "Their technology is usually very visible, like with the Air bubble. We wanna hide everything, layer it and be muted. It's gonna have all the tech you need to go on a run but it's not gonna be in your face. It's really stuff you can be in every day, all day."
A lot of brands promise day-to-night athleisure but that typically means something impersonal. Stretchy fabrics, bland shapes, blander colors. When Our Legacy does daily drivers, they have sauce. The cuts are elegant but fresh, formatted to fit comfortably. Fabrics are pushed to the fore, with subtle tweaks — dropped shoulders, cropped hemlines — recontextualizing approachable shapes.
"We always wanted Work Shop Sport to look like your wardrobe," Hallin says. "Our Legacy has never been about, like, finding one fabric and doing it across 15 SKUs. You that that tactile difference, things that feel aged and things that feel new. Things in between. We like that mix-tape feel."
Don't look at Our Legacy's Procell pop-up as an apertif ahead of the main event, which is still so far off that it doesn't even have an official release date. This is a standalone moment that's less a kick-off than a taste of what's to come, a pedestaling of all the things that makes classic running gear so good: reliable details, easy shapes.
"You will see traces of what we're doing with Nike in stuff like this Work Shop Sport line: we're exploring performance fabrics in Our Legacy silhouettes and with Nike, it's gonna be taken to the next level and added to footwear," Hallin continues. "We're known for leather boots and all that stuff. You're not going to go out for a 10-mile run in the Camions."
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