In 2017, the English skater and designer Lev Tanju traveled from London to New York to take a meeting at the Madison Avenue headquarters of the Ralph Lauren Corporation. Palace, the skate brand Tanju had founded with friends in 2009, was on the brink of a momentous collaboration: working with the legendary American fashion company on a co-branded collection that was set to include silk pajamas, velvet slippers, and the beloved “heelflip” Polo Bear sweater. Ralph Lauren had always been one of Tanju's favorite brands (and a favorite of just about any skater who came up in the '90s). Nevertheless, Tanju arrived for the meeting attired as he would be on most any other day—whether he was going to the pub or the skate park—wearing a pair of heather gray track pants that Palace had produced for a collaboration with Adidas, along with Gucci loafers in fluorescent green croc skin. The pants were particularly noticeable: They had a giant hole in one of the knees. What Tanju hadn't considered was that he might be meeting with Ralph himself.
After a preliminary conversation with executives in a very corporate boardroom, Tanju and Palace cofounder Gareth Skewis were led through a pair of doors directly into Ralph's office. “Oh, okay,” Tanju recalls. “Didn't know about it.” Mr. Lauren, for what it's worth, isn't the type to be too concerned about dress codes, Tanju says. “Ralph don't care about that shit,” he says. “He's so varied in what he wears, do you know what I mean? He looks like a fucking mountaineer or a cowboy half the time. He runs his own kind of shit.”
The meeting was as casual as Tanju was dressed. Lauren talked about his appreciation for European sportswear and his high-end Western offshoot RRL, which Tanju and Skewis had always loved. Tanju shared a story about seeing Lauren at the Ralph store on Madison Avenue years before—at the time he'd thought he was viewing a hologram. Now he was meeting the real thing up close. “I left that meeting,” he continues, “and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is fucking crazy. What did I just do?’ We went and got fucking annihilated afterwards, straightaway. Just went and drank so much booze. It was amazing. Just happy, like, ‘Whoa, do you believe we did that?’ ”
Tanju's dreams have a way of becoming reality, and the collection that would eventually grow out of that meeting included not just sweaters and slippers and pajamas but other classic Polo pieces like rugby shirts and corduroy trousers, all designed by Palace. There were even Polo skate decks. And for the promo campaign behind the collection, there was no reining in Tanju's wild creative impulses. He decided that he wanted to have a horse, ridden by Palace team skater Lucien Clarke, jump over a Volkswagen Golf GTI—a striking collision of iconic European engineering and Ralph Lauren's classic vision of the American West. The next thing he knew, he and Skewis were in Spain, making it happen, with acclaimed British fashion photographer David Sims (who shot the photos accompanying this story). “And the horse fucking jumps over the car,” Tanju says. “And then you're just like, ‘Whoa, that was amazing, man.’ And David Sims takes a photo of it and it becomes a proper thing.”
Lev Tanju recounts this story one recent afternoon via Zoom from his home in London. The conversation is one of a series of rare interviews he and his team have agreed to, offering unprecedented insights into Palace's history and design process. And there's a twinkle in his eye as he recalls the Ralph Lauren collaboration. That pairing had followed other successful partnerships—with Umbro, on a reproduction of an old English football shirt, and with Reebok, on a couple of pairs of trainers—and together those projects spoke to the very essence of Palace's identity: that they could be more than just a skate brand, and that a skate brand could be about more than just skating. Skaters in New York had taken cues from hip-hop and basketball culture and flipped them to make something of their own, and Tanju was bringing the worlds of English house music and football into skateboarding. In doing so, he created a skate brand that could act as a platform for his biggest dreams and a world of new opportunities for the skaters who mattered most to him. “There was nothing that Lev was interested in that he thought Palace couldn't be,” says Fergus Purcell, his longtime graphic designer. “He had the instinct that other people could relate to. And he almost had a fuck-you attitude to the skate industry as it stood, because it actually closed lots of doors in a kind of bullshit way.”
Now, at the age of 39, Tanju has emerged as a kind of creative genius, a design savant with a sensibility so specific, so fully realized, that it has found resonance around the world, among the most fickle skaters, fashion fiends, and streetwear nerds alike. As a marketer, he has an uncanny knack for keeping his customers entertained with unforgettable stunts—fashion is entertainment, after all, and no brand delivers on that like Palace does. Frequently wearing the same Adidas track pants and loafers as when he met with Ralph Lauren, Tanju sticks to a straightforward formula: He simply makes what he likes, and he's just looking to have a good laugh while he's at it. As Purcell recalls, he's been that way since they first met, nearly 20 years ago: “He stood out because even at his very young age, he didn't have any barriers on what he was or what skate culture was.”
Back in 2009, English skating was a snooze—all of the good skate gear was coming from America. That didn't sit right with Lev Tanju. He was just another 20-something skater then, an employee of Slam City Skates, the legendary London shop that shared an address with Rough Trade records, and a fixture at the Southbank skate park, in the shadow of the Waterloo Bridge. Through those two institutions of English skating, Tanju met Gareth Skewis, a fellow skater who would later help to launch the successful but short-lived English skatewear brand Silas and become the co-owner of Slam. He also fell in with a crew of skaters living together in a South London flophouse affectionately known as the Palace. As Tanju found his place in this milieu, he became convinced that the London scene had something to offer the world that was more exciting than the same tired old stuff that had been coming out of Southern California for years. And he believed he was the person to deliver it. “I was just a skateboarder,” he says. “I knew I wanted a skate company. I liked clothes. I wanted to make a skateboard company without looking towards America for references. And to make nice clothes for myself to wear.”
At the time there weren't many skate brands putting serious thought into their garments. Skate clothes were, for the most part, the kind of stuff that was being sold to kids at the mall. There was one company operating on the level that Tanju was imagining, of course, started by another Englishman by the name of James Jebbia. But Supreme represented New York. Why couldn't Tanju do the same thing for London? Ever since Silas had ceased production, Tanju had been talking to Skewis about starting a new brand. But he didn't have a name for the company or a place to begin. Then along came a couple of guys named Tim and Barry, the hosts of a YouTube channel called Don't Watch That TV, which became the megaphone for the South London grime scene. They gave Tanju a show. By this time, the lads at the Palace flophouse had taken to calling themselves the Palace Wayward Boys Choir, and there he found the name for his program: The PWBC Weekly News. Every Wednesday at 4:20 p.m., Tanju would drop a new episode. It was a kind of skate news show, with overdubbed audio and a chaotic edit of skating and news clips, and it became the aesthetic foundation for what Palace would become.
After watching one episode, Skewis called Tanju and said to him, “That board brand we've been talking about? This is it. This is it.” Palace was the natural name. “Palace had a really amazing ring to it,” Skewis says. “Plus, there's the juxtaposition of the house basically being squat and the word Palace. And then, also just the word, the way Palace looks, it's a balanced word, and it has interesting connotations to it.” (Tanju and Skewis also shared a great appreciation for the musician Will Oldham, who released music under several variations of the word Palace, perhaps most famously as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Oldham has appeared on tees and in look books for Palace the brand.)
Through Slam City, Tanju became friends with Fergus Purcell. A graduate of the esteemed London fashion school Central Saint Martins, Purcell later worked for Marc Jacobs, but he grew up loving comic books and skate graphics more than anything. “What was great about skateboarding is that it's such a bastard thing,” Purcell tells me. “Especially in the '90s. It was stealing from everywhere, aesthetically speaking. They'd rip off Tommy Hilfiger, 7-Eleven, fashion brands, anything. And that really appealed to me, that idea that there isn't really any authenticity and there isn't any real ownership of things.”
Tanju knew exactly what the brand was going to be all about when he asked Purcell to create the logo. “I was just into triangles,” Tanju says. “I don't know, they're just a powerful shape, really. I'm not a hippie or anything—I'm not into cosmic stuff. But it's just a very strong shape.” At the time, he was shooting Palace videos on mobile phones—later he'd switch to VHS camcorders. (Meanwhile, the rest of the skate world was in a kind of HD-video arms race.) So when Purcell designed the three-dimensional-triangle logo, the Triferg, it was meant to be something slick that would pop when superimposed over Palace's especially gritty videos. Even more important, when Palace skaters wore tees bearing that logo, it had to be legible. “I was thinking that, especially as Lev was shooting on his phone, it would need to be something really bold to translate through the super shit, grainy, lo-fi-quality video,” Purcell says. “So the idea was to put a massive back print on the shirt so, really, everyone could see what it was.”
Pro Skaters, with few exceptions, are notoriously underpaid and exploited by sponsors, and when Palace was getting off the ground, the skate-brand landscape was particularly bleak. Tanju wanted to build something that represented the skaters he admired, and he wanted to offer them a kind of support he felt they weren't getting. “Everything was a bit soft to me,” Tanju says. “It wasn't very English, and some of the skaters weren't getting represented well by the companies they were riding for. I just wanted to do it myself, make the videos myself and showcase their talents in the way that I saw.”
With Palace, Tanju spotted an opening. “I could support my friends better than what they were getting and pay them more than they would be able to get paid,” he says. He also brought them a cachet they couldn't get elsewhere. And that started with Tanju's personal style, particularly track pants and loafers. Not that he invented either, but both soon became cool-guy menswear essentials. He grew up wearing lots of Polo and Moschino and then went on to orchestrate collaborations between both of those brands and Palace. The Triferg logo quickly became emblematic of an emerging generation of skaters who were excited to embrace new ideas about what a skate brand is and makes. But it was a couple of designs by Tanju that supercharged Palace's reputation: a flip of the Versace Medusa head logo (famously worn by Rihanna) and a play on the Chanel double-C logo. “It's super direct, and Lev is super instinct driven,” Purcell says of the design process. “But so am I. Stuff just sparks between us. He'll say something, or I'll say something to instigate an idea, and that's it. Done deal. Very fluid, very organic, very easy, and very quick.”
Palace has certainly had a hand in setting trends. Its mix of '90s sportswear with bench-made opulence is pervasive now; designer brands like Celine and Dior have been appealing to skaters with recent collections that might make you wonder if Palace was on their mood boards. As for what's on the mood boards at the Palace offices? That's anyone's guess. “Lev's not overtly influenced by anything,” Skewis says. “We've never looked at, like, what's on trend.” And that, he says, is the true proof of Tanju's genius. “His gut instincts, from a marketing and a creative point of view, are normally 100 percent right.”
Palace releases five collections a year. In addition to a constant procession of collaborations, there is an extensive main line that includes plenty of fast-selling T-shirts, hoodies, and six-panel caps with big, graphic logos. But there's also lots of wild stuff—western shirts with floral embroidery, camo Gore-Tex parkas, sweaters with intarsia-knit middle fingers, a million kinds of tracksuits, and, recently, a line of golf apparel made in collaboration with Adidas.
“The real fun is the designing for the guy like me,” says Palace designer Gabriel “Nugget” Pluckrose, Tanju's first hire for the brand. “The skater kid that likes wearing stupid shit. That maybe doesn't mind getting bullied, doesn't mind getting cussed. It's all good. He can deal with that. He looks like an idiot anyway, so it doesn't matter! He's up for being more of an idiot. That's the fun. Because it doesn't matter. Who cares? And that spirit and that humor, that has to always live in every collection. You've kind of lost it if you're not doing that.”
Tanju, for his part, delights in the more eccentric side of Palace's designs. “It's good to make dodgy shit, isn't it?” he says. “I like being surprised by clothes. You should see what fucking Nugget comes to the office wearing. There's a reason why we make weird snakeskin Chelsea boots and shit like that.”
By bringing fashion to skating, Tanju has made his skaters more marketable than ever, without asking any of them to be something they aren't. “I stood by my word, and I love them all dearly,” he says. “And now they get paid well, and they're not getting paid late, and all that bullshit about contracts and stuff. They're my best friends, and I wanted to make a support unit for them, because I think they are some of the best skaters in the world. And they're my favorite skaters.” Tanju says that he only started paying himself a couple of years ago.
Tanju's original ambition to do right by skaters and to help create new financial opportunities for them has worked out better than he imagined. Today, Palace skaters are launching major campaigns and collaborations with other brands across the fashion universe. Lucien Clarke, who has been skating for Palace since the beginning, now has his own pro skate shoe designed by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. And Blondey McCoy, an early Palace team rider who's no longer with the brand, went on to have a modeling career with representation from Kate Moss's agency and launch a skate-inflected London-centric fashion brand of his own, Thames. Most of the Palace Wayward Boys Choir crew still rides for or works at Palace today, and many of them are cult heroes for skaters around the world—Chewy Cannon, Danny Brady, and Benny Fairfax, among others.
For Tanju, the marriage of fashion and skating was an obvious one, even if it wasn't always clear to the Palace Wayward Boys Choir. “Skateboarding is quite, like, I don't know…,” he says. “They don't realize they're involved in fashion. But everybody's fucking looking at someone else's chinos.”
Palace's expansion into new markets and different scenes seems almost outlandish compared to other skate or fashion brands, most of which cater to niche audiences and rarely reach customers outside them. And the company's expansive ethos is only growing stronger. To date, the Triferg logo has been worn by players at Wimbledon, by the Rapha pro cycling team, and on the livery of a Mercedes-AMG GT3 race car during the Nürburgring 24 Hours race. Rihanna, Jonah Hill, and Jay-Z have all been papped in Palace gear. There are Palace stores in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. Palace has made sneakers with Reebok, Adidas, and Vans—a rare footwear trifecta. The list of collaborators also includes Stella Artois, The North Face, and the Happy Mondays. What's become apparent is the simple fact that plenty of brands—even big, multinational mega-brands—need Palace more than Palace needs them.
That's largely because the marketing is so good that it makes you wonder if the marketing is designed to sell the clothes or if the clothes are designed to create the marketing. Of course, both can be true, and neither would be any good if it weren't for Tanju's unique sense of humor. He still writes every Instagram caption and product description for the Palace e-comm shop, including recent gems like “Don't eat too much beige stuff” on a pair of khaki chino pants and “Weird how some people wear camo to not be seen then some people wear camo to be like hey everyone look at me” on a camo hoodie. Even Tanju's approach to writing those descriptions—something most brands would outsource to a junior-level copywriter—comes with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. “If you don't buy the stuff and like the descriptions,” he says, “then I'm going to be fucked, and I'm going to have to cook at home.”
And that innate feel for comedy has helped make Palace a viral brand—those Tanju-isms are widely shared and LOL'd about. But more than that, it has created an undeniable allure, one that catches the attention of both consumers and big corporate collaborators alike. All parties want to be in on the joke—they want to tap into a vein of creativity that's widely appealing and slyly subversive at the same time. That's what sells T-shirts. It's also what persuades Mercedes-Benz to take a meeting.
A recent collaboration with Vans on a line of canvas sneakers featuring occasional Palace mascot Jeremy the Duck put the brand's irreverent marketing brilliance on full display. “We've got to make a video for some Vans,” Tanju says of the project. “What do we do? Do we get a studio and have it spin round and light it all well and be really serious and be like, ‘Vans. Palace. Coming soon’? Or do we just fucking do something mental and get a duck to come into the office and walk out of the lift? And have it shit everywhere in the office?”
The correct answer is to get the duck. The Palace Vans sold out swiftly. Tanju describes these creative visions as “stupid fucking stoner ideas,” but how many stoners come up with something that good when they're baked? And it isn't all jokes at Palace—at least not the kind that involve a duck shitting all over the office. One week after those Vans were released, Palace dropped a collaboration with Juergen Teller, who's been working with the brand on look book and campaign imagery since 2018. One hoodie in the collection features an all-over print photo of a pile of cigarette butts smoked by the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård.
“Lev always had an interesting level of taste,” Skewis tells me. “Lev and I, we're open to influences outside of skateboarding.” There's long been a joke among men's style enthusiasts about the streetwear poseur who wears Supreme but doesn't skate, the implication being that you don't really get the brand if you don't get what the brand is about. Of course, in the case of Supreme, you don't grow to be a billion-dollar business by selling T-shirts and hoodies exclusively to skaters. Tanju makes it very clear that the purpose of Palace is to produce nice clothes for himself and his mates, all of whom skateboard, and to support the skaters he cares about, but that the brand itself is for whomever wants to wear it. “It's for everyone,” Tanju says. “It's a brand. Good brands look after everyone and appeal to everybody. I like so many things. I watch football. I go skating. I just got into surfing, so there's probably going to be more surf shit. I'm not going to pigeonhole myself, and Palace is all about what we all like.” Palace is for skaters, it's made by skaters, but it isn't beholden to skateboarding. The only thing the brand is beholden to, really, is Tanju's mind.
Purcell echoes that point. “It's not for people who are in-the-know,” he says. “I hope I'm making pop art, and if it's good, you see it, you like it, you want it. It doesn't matter where you're from, who you are, how old you are, any of that stuff. It just speaks for itself.”
Ever since the days when the Palace lads were hanging around their South London flophouse, that sly and irreverent humor has been their defining trademark. “To make someone smile or laugh out loud—that's a good goal to aim for,” Purcell says. “To me, the graphics should bypass the consciousness. They just go straight into your subconscious and find some sort of resonance. And humor is a really powerful thing to do that with.”
Being funny is a funny thing. And Tanju has a unique ability to find surprising ways to be funny, and to make his brand funny, beyond the obvious stuff that a consumer engages with directly. In 2019, he organized a collaboration between Palace and the Italian football club Juventus—the team of Cristiano Ronaldo, the prized Nike player who has been called the most marketable athlete in the world. Palace brought a simple idea to Adidas, maker of the official Juventus team uniforms: Let's do some Palace Juventus T-shirts. But what Tanju was really thinking was more like this:
“Okay. How do we get Ronaldo to score a goal in a Palace shirt? ‘Let's get him in a shirt, and you know he's going to score.’ And be that positive about how the whole thing is going to happen. And then it's probably the biggest Nike athlete in the world, wearing Palace Adidas, scoring a goal. Do you know what I mean? And posting a photo of him in this shirt.” The kit, a version of the classic black-and-white stripes Juventus is famous for, but punched up with glowing green accents, debuted in a match against Genoa. Banners on the pitch promoted the collaboration with the words “History. Lols. Passion.” Juventus won the match with a penalty kick scored by Ronaldo with just seconds remaining. “We wanted to surprise people, taking the field with a shirt that is the fruit of a collaboration with an iconic reality of the skate world at a global level,” Giorgio Ricci, Juventus's chief revenue officer, said at the time. “I was just laughing when that shit happened,” Tanju says. “I mean, I was like, ‘Mate, that is the best marketing ever. The Nike guy wearing Adidas Palace, scoring a goal.’ It's just fucking funny.”
Exactly how a bunch of skaters from London manage to orchestrate such feats of brand marketing will always be something of a mystery. Perhaps it's the twinkle in Tanju's eye that does it. All he has to do is walk into the room wearing his torn sweats and croc loafers and magic starts to happen. But it's also the result of 12 or so years of hard work. Consistency. And a certain confidence. “Every brand has got 12 guys that work in the energy department or some shit,” says Tanju. “Energy. And I guess, we bring mad energy to shit, because we care about it. And we think about it in a different way. And we're not a board of 55-year-old men in suits, scratching our chins about what to do next.”
Palace dreams big. They have a good time. Who doesn't want to be part of that? “I don't know how to run a business, to be honest with you,” says Tanju. “We just do what we want to do, and it's working great.”
Noah Johnson is GQ's global style director.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2021 issue with the title "Palace's Accidental Empire."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by David Sims
Styled by Gabriel Pluckrose
Hair by Paul Hanlon
Produced by Partner Films
