It is early November in Stockholm and a light dusting of snow has cast the streets into a sugar-plum metropolis. The air is sharp at -5 degrees and it is very early – perhaps too early – for this white magic. Samuel Fernström, the head of & Other Stories, the newest Swedish retail phenomenon to hit Ireland, is feeling the cold.
“I was skateboarding the last time I was in Stockholm,” he says, gesturing at a slowly growing pile of lily-white slush outside the brand’s shop on Biblioteksgatan. Fernström is just back from Los Angeles, where he is preparing to open another store: New York, Washington and a three-storey building in Dublin are to follow.
Ireland has been on the brand’s retail hit list since it opened its first space on London’s Regent Street – a massive, utilitarian chic home to a blend of Swedish minimalism, Parisian maximalism, cult beauty products and English-language fashion magazines. In short, it’s a material aggregation of “cool”. What’s been stopping the brand from opening here before, when sister retailer COS (both brands are owned by high street behemoth H&M) already has a sizeable presence in the country? Fernström says it’s all about the right space.
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To the delight of many, & Other Stories is setting up shop in the old A-Wear building on 26-27 Grafton Street, one of Dublin’s busiest retail hubs. Shoppers from the early days may remember it as slightly dark and dim, but the brand is currently turning it into a white and light-filled area.
Uniformity
In Stockholm, as in Regent Street, the stores have a certain uniformity. Old floors and light fixtures are peeled back, beams and pipes are exposed, succulents and perennials punctuate the decor with blasts of green. Almost everything is white – whiter than the snow falling outside on Biblioteksgatan. All the stores are the same but different, melding their minimalist outlook to existing features within the building. This is what Irish retailers can expect when the store opens to the buying public on December 9th.
Then there’s the clothes. Oh, yes. The clothes. The design teams are based in Stockholm and Paris, with two definite aesthetics. Paris is bohemian and glitzy, with flirty embroidery and studied quirk. Stockholm is much more minimal, with solidly reassuring shapes and, for the most part, a flattering neutral palette. An LA atelier is set to open in Spring 2017, with designs to be sold worldwide, including the Grafton Street store. With this new design hub, the brand hopes to inject some more sun into its aesthetic.
These three definite design looks have very little in common, so the question begs to be asked: just what is & Other Stories’ brand image? There’s the romantic Parisienne, the slick Swede and the soon-to-be-sunny LA woman. It seems an asynchronous collection of looks and outlooks. However, the lack of definition may be the very definition of & Other Stories; their gathering together of typical Cool Girl styles is a powerful statement in itself.
Idiosyncrasy
The brand seems to strive towards idiosyncrasy, and that is reflected back at its customers. In the window of the Biblioteksgatan store, a spotlight shines on a literal traffic-stopper of a dress: a sequin-encrusted, traffic-light red mini dress with a deep V neckline. A rail of scarlet sequins blare from just inside the entrance, where a selection of sizes are filed near sturdy black boots and simple jersey pieces.
While in many high street stores the customer is encouraged to aspire towards a look – this jacket with these jeans with these boots – the & Other Stories customer is encouraged to aspire to separate pieces and to wear them their own way. While many of the pieces are trend-led (though not to the extent of its Topshop or Zara counterparts), the onus is on the customer to create their own look. It’s a canny psychological move in a world that encourages small acts of personal creativity against the opposite demands of mass production and consumption. Even the name of the brand signifies personal expression and emphasises the importance of the customer as a creative force. It’s not just “& Other Stories”. It’s “The Customer . . . & Other Stories”.
Skincare line
It may surprise fans of the brand to learn that it wasn’t always about clothing. & Other Stories was conceived as a high-end cosmetics and skincare line, which has been longer in the making than the mainline apparel collections. As a result, its make-up offerings are quite possibly the best-developed and most inclusive on the high street and its range of simple yet evocative scents in soaps to body lotions and more are uniformly great for layering. In the Stockholm atelier, plonked unassumingly in a residential area, there is a mock-up of a cosmetics store layout that made this journalist feel excited about experimenting with creams and chroma again.
Perhaps nothing encapsulates the brand more than its Swedish atelier, which is exactly as devotees of the brand might expect. In the canteen, where staff drink the rocket fuel soup that is Swedish coffee, there is a scrapbook wall chronicling the brand’s short history, from the Regent Street shop to its now 43 stores in Europe and the US. Scribbling, shoots and snapshots overlap from floor to ceiling. Framed under glass are several scraps of paper: handwritten, over and over, looping and scratching – each iteration slightly different in style, but all bearing the same name. & Other stories, it says.
