& Other Stories Is Secretly So Good

& Other Stories is a brand that flies under the radar in the U.S. market, but if you see it on the street you instantly wonder “Where’d she get that!?” (Just ask ELLE.com’s photo editor Mariel Tyler, because I question her daily about where she got x, y, and z, and the answer is always the same: & Other Stories, she says. Again.)

The Swedish clothing, accessories, and beauty brand is owned by the H&M Group and they celebrating their five-year anniversary with little fanfare, because that’s just the kind of company it is.

The brand’s designs are ageless and inclusive—previous campaigns featured transgender women and women over seventy years old—and they offer everything from soap to shoes to sweaters. It’s also reasonably priced. Price points hover around $75 for ready-to-wear, and caps off at $500 for their irresistible leather jackets. But it’s the brand’s unique, conceptual approach to design that sets them apart. They invited ELLE.com—me, a Stories stan—to visit their headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden to find out how they do it.

A House Divided

Stories originally started as an idea to launch a beauty brand, but the H&M team behind the secret project realized they had more to say. So from its conception, & Other Stories intended to be a collection of different perspectives, hence their name. They triple down on this mission by hosting three separate design ateliers across the globe: at their home base in Stockholm, Sweden, with their largest design team in Paris, France, and a Los Angeles, California extension that focuses on ready-to-wear. Each atelier designs inclusively with no overlap between designers from other cities, but they’re sold alongside each other within stores.

“In each atelier, [we are] designing for the women of our city that we identify with,” says Caity Knox, head designer of the L.A. outpost. The tag of each product states which city it was designed in, and their aesthetics differ in obvious ways. Paris’ atelier is delicate, adorned in rhinestones and hearts and ruffles. Stockholm sticks to the Scandinavian predilection for architectural shapes, and the Los Angeles girl is, as Knox described it, “out on the town one night, the next she’s in her bikini on the beach or in sweats walking her dog.” They even tag their Instagram posts with the atelier the look is associated with.

Why does Stories take this global approach? Most women don’t adhere one city’s stereotypical sense of style—you mix it up like a normal person. “The & Other Stories customer globally can walk into the store and build, from the three ateliers, her own personal style,” Knox says. At Stories, you can simultaneously be the Parisian it-girl, dress in that laid back cool associated with Southern California, or test the waters of a structured Scandinavian top.

How Designer Collaborations Should Be

Collaborations are par for the course for mid-range brands aiming to connect their customer to high-end fashion designers and celebrities (The list is endless: think H&M x Alexander Wang, Gigi Hadid x Tommy Hilfiger, etc. ). But the way & Other Stories does their version—dubbed Co-Labs—is created organically. Again, the brand’s name is specifically engineered to foster these relationships: [fill in the designer/celeb/artist] & Other Stories.

“It’s been part of our DNA from the start,” says Anna Nyrén, head of Co-Labs. “We couldn’t really hire [fashion designers] so we needed to find a way of creating amazing things with them.” Their Co-Lab roster includes everyone from artists to fashion industry heavyweights like Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte. It’s a platform to work with both indie designers and celebrities, but with surprisingly organic roots. Most of their partnership grew internally with random connections to Stories’ own staff members, making for collections that look and feel authentic, as opposed to a viral celebrity play.

Example 1, the celebrity, 2014: “Lykke Li is a good friend with Nicole [Wilson], our shoe designer,” Nyrén says. “So this collaboration started when Lykke wanted a pair of boots to wear on stage when she was going out on a tour [and] we ended up making a whole collection from the one conversation.”

Example 2, the indie designer, 2016: “[With] Zana Bayne you can really see that we worked with her pieces and sort of integrated [them] with our ready-to-wear to make looks that would work for our customer as well.” The end result is a collection of Bayne’s instantly recognizable leather pieces, coupled with crisp button downs and sharp dresses, i.e. how a woman would actually wear them.

Example 4, the haute couture designers, 2016: Rodarte collaborated with Target back in 2009, the baby era of designer collabs. But this was on a different level of execution. Think ’70s-era disco dresses, shrunken suede jackets, and silk tops that don’t belong any where near high street prices. It remains a personal regret for not hoarding the entire collection when it launched.

Example 3, the artist, 2017: Again, the collaboration between Kim Gordon & Other Stories began through mutual connections with staff at their Los Angeles atelier, and it naturally grew from there. Nyrén explains: “As an artist she did her prints and we used our garments as white canvases.”

The Story Continues

Look, the clothes are really good. You’d be hard-pressed to enter a store and not leave with something. The brand is still in their toddler stage, so you can only expect them to continue churning out the affordable it-bag, suspiciously comfortable heels, and the “did you get that at Barney’s” sweater from here on out.