Palace’s Nike Collaboration Is “the Most Exciting Thing” It’s Ever Done (EXCLUSIVE)
For Palace, Nike was the dream collaboration. I can say this with confidence because Lev Tanju, co-founder and creative director of the London-based skate label, told me so at least six times across the span of our half-hour phone call.
“I’m more excited than I've ever been, man,” he says on his morning walk to the brand’s South London offices, the odd siren or car horn occasionally drowning him out. “It's the most exciting thing I've ever done.”
Certainly, this is the biggest, most ambitious collaboration Palace has attempted in its 16-year history which, remember, has included partnerships with everyone from fellow sportswear giant adidas to luxury fashion titan Gucci.
Nike and Palace’s debut partnership is football-first — Palace is British, after all — and anchored by the sportswear label's T90 boot. It’s appropriately titled“P90.”
The campaign underscores the bigness of it all by casting English footballing legend Wayne Rooney and veteran London rapper Giggs, and things get even bigger with the opening of a permanent Palace x Nike community center.
That’s a lot of stuff to pack into one collaboration. But this is Palace’s dream come true, remember.
“It had to be this big and this grand and this ambitious,” says Gareth Skewis, Palace co-founder and CEO. “When you've got the opportunity to do something like this, you gotta go for it. There are no half measures.”
For Palace, it’s all or nothing, a notion epitomized by its transformation of Manor Place into a communal hangout.
Built in 1895, and once a boxing gym used by athletes as disparate as Tanju’s grandfather and notorious London gangsters the Kray twins, Manor Place had fallen into disrepair before Palace came calling. “It was like a bomb site,” says Tanju. Skewis remembers attending illegal raves there in the early 2000s.
When it reopens on October 31, Manor Place will be unrecognizable. It’s now an indoor concrete skate park capable of a Transformers-style metamorphosis into a football pitch. “It's a mad idea,” admits Tanju. “Everyone was laughing at me [when I suggested it].”
Maybe not so mad after all. It just needed a little high-tech engineering. To achieve Tanju’s dream, the middle of the skate park, where a series of reclaimed concrete benches make up a street section, opens up to reveal a hidden subterranean football cage.
The Palace creative director was instrumental in designing every element of the park. His favorite sections from his favorite London skate parks, Southbank and Stockwell, are exhaustively recreated, down to the floor tiles matching those in Southbank. “It’s so funny, ‘cos Southbank is only down the road,” Tanju laughs. He’s even managed to revive a relic of London skate history, bringing back the sorely missed Victoria Benches, which he calls “maybe the most iconic skate spot in London.”
“They got knocked out about 4 years ago, and somehow we found someone who was working on the site and bought them,” says Tanju. “They weigh about a ton each.”
Beyond the shape-shifting skate park/football pitch, Manor Place includes a gallery space that changes exhibition every month or so — the opening exhibition shows the work of photographer and Palace collaborator Alasdair McLellan — and a creative studio that’ll host a half-dozen emerging creatives for nine-month rotating residencies. And it’s all available to use for free.
“We wanted to build something that is free, safe, and warm,” says Skewis. “It’s not often you get to say that about anything enjoyable in any cosmopolitan city.”
Manor Place is what really makes this collaboration “the largest thing Palace has ever done,” says Skewis. Both the collection, which releases on October 31, and its coinciding campaign, shot at Manor Place, are almost equally ambitious, however.
Nike T90, the most famous of the sportswear giant's football lines, gets a Palace-flavored rebrand. P90 pulls neon green sleeveless football tops and baggy tracksuits from Nike’s archives, littering these 2000s styles with hits of Palace branding. “I love the look of the Swoosh going through the Tri-Ferg. It's just iconic for me. It's a banging logo lock-up,” says Tanju.
Tanju grew up in a football-obsessed family, his father once a semi-professional player in Turkey. And with Palace, he created possibly the first-ever football shirt produced by a skate label with its 2012 UMBRO collaboration, long before football-inspired gear became broadly popular, “It caused an uproar in the skate world,” says Tanju. “Everyone thought [skateboarding and football] should be completely separate, and I never thought they should.” Still, perhaps the only thing more surreal than seeing his brand’s logo atop the most revered football gear of the ‘00s is seeing Wayne Rooney, Manchester United's all-time top goalscorer, wearing it.
“What a legend. It's just the dream, really, getting him [for a campaign],” says Tanju. “Seeing Wayne Rooney outside our building in Palace P90,” Skewis says wistfully. “Certain things you don't think are ever going to happen.”
Rooney isn’t even the only high-profile footballer in the mix. England women’s captain Leah Williamson and Chelsea’s captain Reece James join burgeoning ballers Lenna Gunning-Williams and Jamie Bynoe-Gittens, and Palace skate team riders like Savannah Stacey Keenan and Pedro Attenborough alongside MOBO-award-winning rapper Giggs for perhaps Palace’s most packed campaign to date. “Our dream cast,” says Tanju. For “our dream scenario.”
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