How to mark a milestone? At Our Legacy, Cristopher Nying and team decided to take an introspective rather than retrospective approach to the season. The spring 2026 collection—called B-Sides—marks the Swedish brand’s second decade. And it truly feels 20 years young, having retained a scruffy “just kids” attitude while simultaneously becoming more refined. To build on the music metaphor introduced by the collection’s title, OL bridges the analog-digital divide, retaining elements of the cassette tape and the audio file.
It’s refreshing, and completely in character, that Nying would shy away from a big anniversary blowout in favor of pouring his energy and love into his passion: developing textiles and making clothes. The tactility of the pieces even seeps into the way they’re described: Materials are washed, waxed, dipped, speckled, coarse, soft, worn, oily, glazed, and deep. Just as various are the collection’s shades of black, including void, soot, whisker, deep abyss, jet, and more. There is also a wide range of khakis, as well as touches of bordeaux and purple.
On a call, the designer described this season an “internal process,” very much focused on in-jokes (see the “Angry Fan Mail” print made from actual correspondence received over the years). The starting point, as ever, is tailoring—sharp and technical, or soft and deconstructed—along with biker and military influences. A couple of the looks reference the first vintage garment Nying bought: “a pair of Swedish military overalls that we cut off and said, ‘This should be the Our Legacy jacket,’ but we never really did it until now, which is very funny.”
The men’s and women’s looks are more in harmony than they’ve ever been here. A man’s uniform jacket is made feminine by shaping, while a small back slit, more commonly used in women’s garb, is added to the men’s version. Lace appears throughout the collection, including on military-inspired looks, and a large-scale camouflage intarsia reads more punk than hawkish. Also included are new, not nostalgic, takes on some OL hits, such as the tuxedo bomber or the “Angel of Death” print introduced in the first collection in 2005. Enjoying their debuts are some materials that didn’t make the edit the first time around, like an iridescent knit. “It’s something,” Nying said, “that we’ve always talked about internally, how something is shifting.”
The notion of shifting hews close to the idea of “defamiliarization,” a concept that the designer was playing with here and realized with extreme subtlety. Nying delights in the way that the same dye or pattern takes on different properties depending on the fabric it’s applied to, which explains the varying, and unexpected, shades of lilac that pop up. Eschewing any sense of gimmicky surreality, materials and colors are transformed, so a nylon takes on the guise of embossed canvas, and jeans are printed to look exactly like their twin in denim. Natural fibers mix with technical ones, as on a trench coat where the back is a drapey flow of lining fabric. In cutting another raincoat in gothy black mesh, Nying toyed with the idea of its very functionality.
There is something gentle about the collection, despite the appearance of skeletal angels and some tough black leather. “For me, we were always a bit of a garage band,” Nying said when asked what this collection would sound like if it were music. “But maybe this is a bit more finished, like we afforded a bit better studio. As a band, maybe it’s Sonic Death to Sonic Youth.” [Sonic Death is an early live recording by Sonic Youth, released on cassette in 1984.] In any case, there’s no doubt that this collection is akin to an unplugged performance, one that reveals the true talent and heart of a brand that needs no auto-tuning.
