Cooking is a new passion for Our Legacy’s Christopher Nying, who grew up in a home where food was an expression of love. He spread the more this season by taking over a restaurant in Milan and preparing a meal for a gathering of friends and colleagues. His fall collection, called Feast, was similarly welcoming. You can always count on OL for a perfect jacket, leather toppers, unusual knits and great separates for layering, and they were all there, rendered in the colors of different earth fungi. While the menu of offerings remained familiar, Nying made many subtle and savory changes to his “recipes.”
This collection, the designer said during a phone call, was the second part of a story that began in 2019 with the brand’s Chambre Séparée collection, which was presented at the chic Café Opera in Stockholm and had a theme of “juvenile depravity in a bourgeois setting’. The party was presented as a more ‘proletariat’ rehearsal dinner in an industrial space with plastic chairs. A sequel to the photography book by Beate and Heinz Rose from 1972 Couple (a copy of which was used as a prop) which documented West German couples of all ages and backgrounds against a white background. Nying similarly worked with a cast of all ages, placing them together against the chalky walls. He expanded the idea of a motley crew into an eclectic offering that reveled in the details. The designer called the women’s look 6 and the men’s look 29 examples of the season. He wears wrinkled sweatpants and a hoodie that looks like acid-washed denim, with a white shirt, a leather tie, and a sleek black blazer. She wears a long slip dress in a soft blue check (an intentional grunge reference) with a thick beige sweater that is almost tunic length, and she carries a black leather clutch and gloves. Her hair is held not with hairpins, but with tie clips, a beautiful example of Nying’s attention to detail and the deep tenderness that runs through his work.
“Imagine what happens when you take off the tie, glasses or gloves…[elements] which in my mind are quite formal: you become someone else,” said the designer, noting that he was also focused on “homely things.” And so a simple plastic bread clip was rendered as a silver pendant; the same metal was used for delicate lace accessories, inspired by Swedish pantry shelf decorations. The lace incorporated into garments was intended to reference curtains, and within the context of the theme, slip shapes became apron-like. There was no great distance between interiority and interiority at Our Legacy this season – and there is no season for that matter. The brand’s special sauce is making quality, not-quite-classic clothing with a throwaway, anti-fashion glamour. (Effortlessness, in fashion speak.) OL isn’t flashy in any way, but instead creates pieces that you buy for yourself to enhance both your individuality and the indie’s credibility.
As Our Legacy shows in Milan, in a predominantly Catholic country: This editor was tempted to think of The Last Supper, but that was not one of Nying’s references. However, parties are secular rituals, and in such divisive times, OL’s impulse to deconstruct the formality of the party (as well as that of the wardrobe) and focus on coming together seemed both humanistic and spot-on. After all, food is a form of diplomacy. As it is written in the New Testament, “It is difficult to remain enemies when you have broken bread together.”
