When we last caught up with Swedish retailers Très Bien in March, their 2020 was right on track. A brand new London store, complete with a fresh lick of paint and filled with the finest contemporary menswear, was about to open in Soho and they’d just had a pretty wonderful party to celebrate.
But, as we all know now, that was sadly a false dawn — the world quickly ground to a halt thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. However, rather than sulk in silence, brothers and founders Simon and Hannes Hogeman took a proactive approach to the situation, being one of the first notable stores to offer virtual store visits over Zoom. This wasn’t a commercially-minded approach to the pandemic, given you couldn’t actually buy anything, but instead a refreshingly thoughtful way of keeping their staff connected with their regular customers.
It’s this same thought-out approach that led to the brand’s super limited new ATELJÉ collection, which is releasing to coincide with their store reopening in London. As lockdown slowed down the team’s day-to-day work, they used the opportunity to consider both their place in the industry and the unhoned in-house skills they had at their disposal.
Utilising the skills of the brand’s local network in Malmö, the company came up with a collection of four hand-crafted garments, including the grown-up double-layered Fold Shirt, a Michael Jordan-inspired baseball shirt and a pair of worker pant-inspired Fatigue Shorts — complete with an elasticated waist to accommodate your lockdown banana bread diet.
Every element of the collection’s production was carried out by people within or connected to the company, with Très Bien avoiding the use of industrial machinery. The brand founder’s mother-in-law hand sewed the clothes; the labels for delivery boxes were hand-printed at home by a member of their online product team; even the campaign model used to worked in their logistics team. A full-on DIY project… what’s not to love about that?!
TRÈS BIEN ATELJÉ will be available to buy from July 2