Shopping London With Four Pins: Our Legacy

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Complex Original

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"Shopping With Four Pins" is an ongoing series in which Amardeep Singh takes us on a tour of the country's best shops. See them all here.

Part II: Our Legacy

London's Soho is surprisingly similar to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Being the neighborhoods that were considered as "cool" and "bohemian" for relatively long periods of time in their respective cities, they actually hurt themselves in being so hip that they eventually encouraging development, raising rents to unsustainable levels and driving out the actual cool businesses that constituted the now formerly "cool" neighborhood. Those are the signifiers of gentrification, after all. London's Soho seems to have suffered this fate a couple years ago after the closing of a few known seedy businesses and a huge boom in the childhood population. But instead of becoming a large, grey-faced media building dead zone, it seems like the neighborhood might've actually de-cooled so far that it's kind of cool again, a direction I see Haight-Ashbury similarly going in once the tech bubble pops.

Shops like Oi Polloi, one of the best examples of a staple menswear webshop if there ever was one, and A.P.C., a brand I don't have to tell you anything about, have opened up outposts in the previously definitively uncool Soho neighborhood in the past year. As a London-ignorant New Yorker, I have no clue if the neighborhood is actually bustling with anti-cool-cool buzz as it's still unbelievably expensive to have a retail space, but in talking with a few locals it seems like Soho could be in the midst of a full gentrification circle and on it's way to being habitable again. Or maybe it's just another cycle of a gentrification infinity-loop that will cripple all the megalopolises in the world in the century to come. I don't know, man. I'm not a city planner or an economic analyst. I'm just saying. Whatever the case, Our Legacy, a personal and Four Pins favorite, opened up their London Soho shop a year ago and I swung by to check it out because, well, it's Our Legacy. I mean, come on.

Our Legacy is just one of those brands. I can't imagine what kind of human being you must be if you don't like Our Legacy. What kind of Four Pins reader are you? Now that my bias towards Our Legacy has been clearly stated in such an overt manner, I'll continue. The London store serves as a place to get a small sampling of the full Our Legacy collection as selections from a large collection fit inside a surprisingly small store on no more than four clothing racks and a few hangers littered throughout. Even taking its size into consideration, the store is still an impressive one.

Tucked away on something of a side street, its quiet setting works well with the comfortable decor of the store, presenting an all-around cozy experience that reminded me why I'm such a big fan of the brand to begin with. There are no fancy bells and whistles, but there are also no boring or basic elements either. Like the collections themselves, everything feels like it has the perfect amount of quirkiness embedded in it to be just the right kind of mentally stimulating. The most recent mid-season "Splash" offering, a capsule within the proper F/W 15 collection, is a perfect representation of that ideal quirk level and also the origin of a couple of my favorite pieces in the store right now. Most notably, a reversible bomber jacket with a black furry "teddy" outer with a quilted MA-1 orange-colored nylon inner, which is a surprisingly affordable €400. Another personal favorite were the trainers with a super thick, chunky Vibram sole on an otherwise fairly low-key silhouette.

Our Legacy continues to impress with their nuance in crafting pieces that are simultaneously both very weird and not weird and their London shop continues that tradition by extension with its interior design and presentation of their collection. The Soho store is definitely worth a visit both by London residents and travelers alike.

Our Legacy

1 Silver Pl, London W1F 0JW, United Kingdom

+44 20 7734 5374

Amardeep Singh is a writer and photographer living in New York. You can see more of his work here and follow him on Twitter here.

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