BUILDING PALACE BRICK BY BRICK
Lev Tanju and his crew started Palace Skateboards as an idea, then grafted it into a real-life citadel of skate style. This is how they went from undercroft to high achievement.
An hour’s journey there, from the southern suburbs of home to Waterloo station: then a quick rattling skate down the embankment. All day spent in the undercroft of the Southbank Centre in London, just as long as their wheels kept turning and their joints held up. In California they get to skate in the sun: in London there’s a darker, grittier but very celebrated space where skateboarders meet, gestate and create.
It was here around 20 years ago that a dozen kids destined to leave their mark used to spend their days. There was Daniel “Snowy” Kinloch, a professional skater and later a fashion photographer. Blondey McCoy, a model and artist with a long association with the photographer Alasdair McLellan. The gallerist and filmmaker James Edson and the Anglo-Jamaican Lucien Clarke, who struck a deal with Virgil Abloh to design Louis Vuitton’s first skate shoe.
The last to join the group was the son of a Turkish footballer who had made a name for himself at home in the minor divisions before emigrating to England, starting a family and opening a restaurant frequented by Jack Nicholson, the Bros twins Luke and Matt Goss and the heavyweight boxer Frank Bruno. The patrons were sometimes wealthy but a meal always cost only a few pounds at Jack’s Place in Clapham, run by a family that has always proudly stayed working class. “I liked computers, I loved drawing, but I hadn’t yet got my teeth into something as strong as skate culture, with that feeling of friendship and community. Finally, I’d found my purpose in life,” that boy says today. Twelve years ago Lev Tanju founded the skateboard and streetstyle brand Palace and two decades later he still keeps his friends from those days around him, creating and designing, including his long-time partner Gareth Skewis.
When they came of age, but still a long way from the future, they all moved together into a grimy apartment in Waterloo crammed with videotapes and with broken boards hanging from the walls. A skatehouse jokingly called “The Palace” that then gave its name to their crew, the Palace Wayward Boys Choir, and finally the brand. It slowly stopped feeding off American hip hop, replacing the alien soundtrack with techno and drum ‘n bass from the London underground scene. They rejected the style of video clips that came from California – shot from helicopters and with skaters looking like Hollywood actors – to excavate a raw, homegrown way of doing things. “At first we all dreamed of being born in the USA. But my goal was for the Californians to envy us because we came from London,” says Tanju. Fulfilling his vision, he has just done a deal for a collection with Lotties, the idolised Los Angeles skate shop.
Palace is a brand that works as fast as the crew that built it skates. It launches new items every weekend that promptly sell out, fuelling the hunger and searches on the resale market, at the same time signing collaborations with Adidas, Reebok, Umbro and Moschino. Thousands of pieces are sold online and four monobrand stores have opened worldwide: London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Lev Tanju says he opened them without asking anyone for a pound, whether it was a bank or a shareholder. “I asked my mother to lend me the money to pay the athletes who worked with us. And even when Madonna, Rihanna and Justin Bieber were already wearing our things, I still grudged myself a salary.” For the past four years, Lev has been paying himself a salary. He is 38 years old, has two dogs, and with his girlfriend has moved to a country house outside London. In the garden he has a ramp built by King Ramps, the company founded by English skate legend Pete King. Although for years any connection between football and skate was considered culturally incongruous, in 2019 he worked with Adidas on a capsule collection with Juventus FC, with the numbers and the sponsor accented fluorescent yellow. Then, widening his contacts even further, he managed to enter Wimbledon on the backs of tennis players like Alexander Zverev and Garbine Muguruza. And since he started playing golf three years ago, he has wanted Palace to have a dedicated collaboration with the champion Dustin Johnson’s endorsement. “Does our public understand everything we do? They don’t have to understand it,” says Lev. “They can simply check our cross-references and trust everything has a foundation and comes from a long way back. It’s all deeply felt, honest and true.”
Just as the triangles of the logo (designed by Fergus Purcell) recall geometries swirling around themselves, Palace’s culture is also made up of rotating inclusiveness and a free play on the now immense field of street style. One of the first t-shirts it made bore a logo-flipped Versace Medusa on the front. Another was a parodic riff on the Chanel brand: “At the time we didn’t have an email or office address, and we could play all these games. At most, the lawyers could have seized some VHSs and dirty t-shirts,” he jokes. Asked how many Palace buyers have ever set foot on a board at a guess, Lev Tanju candidly confesses that he has no idea. And that knowing it would make no difference: “We just put the coloured bricks of a very broad identity on the market. People look, choose, match. And ultimately they invent themselves.”