Cooking is a new-ish passion for Our Legacy’s Christopher Nying, who grew up in a home where food was an expression of love. He spread the amore 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 hospitable. 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 various earthy fungi. While the menu of offerings remained familiar, Nying made many subtle and savory changes to his “recipes.”
This collection, said the designer on a call, was the second part of a story that started in 2019 with the brand’s Chambre Séparée collection, which was presented at Stockholm’s upscale Café Opera and had a theme of “youth depravation in a bourgeois setting.” Feast was imagined as a more “proletariat” rehearsal dinner in an industrial space with plastic chairs. Iterating on Beate and Heinz Rose’s 1972 photography book Paare (a copy of which was used as a prop) that documented West German couples of all ages and backgrounds against white backdrops, Nying similarly worked with a cast of all ages and positioned them together against the chalky walls. He extended the idea of a motley crew into an eclectic offering that delighted in the details. The designer called out women’s look 6 and men’s look 29 as being exemplars of the season. He wears creased track pants and a hoodie that have the look of acid-washed denim with a white shirt, leather tie, and sharp black blazer. She has on a long slip dress in a soft blue plaid (a deliberate grunge reference) with an almost-tunic-length thick beige sweater and carries a black leather clutch and gloves. Her hair is held back not with hair pins but tie clips, a superb example of Nying’s attention to detail and the deep vein of tenderness that runs through his work.
“Imagine what happens if you remove the tie or remove the glasses or the gloves—[elements] which in my head are quite formal—you become someone else,” said the designer, who noted 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 lacy accessories inspired by Swedish pantry shield trims. The lace made into garments was meant to reference curtains, and within the context of the theme, slip shapes became apron-like. There wasn’t a great distance between interiors and interiority chez Our Legacy this season—nor is there any season, for that matter. The brand’s special sauce is making quality, not-quite classic clothing that has a throwaway, anti-fashion glamour. (Effortlessness, in fashion-speak.) Not showy in any way, OL makes pieces that you buy for yourself to amplify your individuality as well as indie credibility.
As Our Legacy shows in Milan, in a predominantly Catholic country: this editor was tempted to think of The Last Supper, but that wasn’t one of Nying’s references. Feasts are, however, secular rituals, and in such divisive times, OL’s impulse to deconstruct the formality of the feast (as well as that of the wardrobe) and focus on coming together seemed both humanistic and spot-on. Food, after all, is a form of diplomacy. As it’s written in the New Testament, “It’s hard to remain enemies when you’ve broken bread together.”