Scandi Mens Style Is Doing Sustainable Fashion Right

Scandi women had been first to realize street-style cred, but it surely’s Scandi boys who must be your subsequent sustainable-style inspo.

Ten years in the past, flush with the cash I had saved from my first actual job, I tentatively wandered into Jonathan + Olivia, a cutting-edge boutique on Toronto’s Ossington strip that, tragically, closed in 2018. It was having certainly one of its legendary gross sales, and I scoured the racks in the hunt for an reasonably priced designer piece that might, I hoped, speed up my metamorphosis into a trendy, refined particular person and stumbled upon a raglan-sleeved crewneck sweatshirt in a gray mélange. It was weightier and reduce boxier than the threadbare sweatshirts of my youth — an elevated important layer I may put on casually or costume up. I checked the tag to see who had made this distinctive garment and found a males’s label I had by no means heard of earlier than: Our Legacy.

Immediately, Our Legacy stays on the forefront of Scandinavian menswear, exporting its imaginative and prescient of quirkily layered cool to in-the-know guys world wide, together with the model Mfpen from Denmark and One other Side and Asket from Sweden. These labels mission an perspective about dressing that emphasizes individuality and wearability with a sustainable ethos. Some, like Mfpen and Our Legacy, use dead-stock materials or digital printing methods to save lots of water and reduce waste. Others, like Asket and One other Side, promote a “purchase much less, purchase higher” ethos to encourage buying solely what you want and nothing else.

Let’s name the lads who embody these sartorial values “Scandi boys.” Not like Scandi girls, who appear to decorate in extremes (tremendous minimalist or Ganni-fied and garish), Scandi boys have a method that resembles elevated norm-core — in accordance with native designers and stylists and a scan of street-style pictures from the current Copenhagen Fashion Week. Suppose clear shapes, muted tones and at-first-glance unassuming matches amped up with freaky-functional layering and refined gender blurring. However the satan is within the particulars: an uncluttered closet that’s heavy on sustainably made on a regular basis staples blended with second-hand grails. So, what type classes can all of us study from them?

Within the early aughts, Scandi manufacturers Zits Studios and Filippa Okay grew to become the de facto uniform for style insiders (and wannabe insiders) due to their uncooked denim, white sneakers and merino-wool sweaters. The style press later labelled the rising development “Scandinavian minimalism” — a time period that also sticks. It doesn’t a lot seize a method as a mentality that informs design, type and consumption. “Scandinavian style comes from this factor of practicality and luxury,” says Sarah Arts, the top of brand name advertising and communications at Asket. “That doesn’t should imply you neglect type or aesthetic. However I feel when you actually have a look at all Scandinavian manufacturers, from inside to style, there may be that factor of fresh shapes, practicality and heat.”

A few of in the present day’s Scandi boys gravitate towards extra traditional garments, in accordance with Nicole Walker, a Swedish stylist who has labored with über-cool manufacturers together with Our Legacy. However they’re experimenting with silhouette and gender inside the confines of conventional menswear. She additionally feels there are variations inside Scandi type. The Danes, she muses, see themselves as “tremendous ultra-expressive” whereas the Swedes hew towards minimalism. “The menswear scene in Stockholm is absolutely evolving, perhaps much more than the womenswear, due to this concept of blending new and previous items and actually discovering private expression,” says Walker, extolling the resale marketplace for fuelling this sense of discovery and restyling present garments in novel methods.

Asket represents a contemporary model of Scandinavian minimalism. Jakob Dworsky and August Bard Bringéus launched the label in 2015 with a T-shirt and have been constructing a everlasting assortment of about 50 “zero compromise clothes,” or timeless, ethically made wardrobe necessities, together with Oxford shirts, great-fitting denim and chore coats that “males will depend on 99 out of 100 days,” says Arts. “What’s actually necessary is to acknowledge that the attire business is essentially flawed,” she says. “It’s about tackling this cycle of overproduction and overconsumption and actually getting individuals to reconnect with their garments, to consider what they really want.” (For Arts, these values replicate the Swedish idea of lagom, which interprets to “simply sufficient.”) Asket reinforces that dedication by way of its retail technique. The model operates a Stockholm flagship and one other retailer promoting samples, returns and second-hand objects.

Daniel Brøndt, co-founder of One other Side, a small Swedish menswear model, champions the same spirit. “We don’t assume individuals want 10 pairs of denims,” he says. “We predict they want perhaps two or three actually good pairs that they’ll preserve for a really very long time.” One other Side releases two collections a yr of sustainable hard-working staples with simply sufficient path to catch the attention of a buyer searching for traditional items with a recent twist. The model’s organic-cotton relaxed button-ups and straight-fit denim are bought at specialty boutiques like Voo Retailer in Berlin and made an look at a pop-up at Colbo in New York final yr. It’s the proper time for Brøndt’s model to shine: Scandinavian guys are returning to a traditional wardrobe after recovering from logomania, he says. The reality is that there is no such thing as a singular Scandi-boy type, no unified aesthetic. However the development of sustainably minded manufacturers and the resale market have blasted the door open to uncharted style universes. Somewhat lagom goes a good distance. And for what it’s value, I wore that Our Legacy sweatshirt for years, till it shrank right into a crop high.

This text first appeared in FASHION’s April 2024 challenge. Find out more here.