Lev Tanju took up skating as a teenager in the late-’90s and quickly immersed himself in the Southbank skate scene. It was there that Tanju met a cast of like-minded skaters that were all around the same age. That crew included Lucien Clarke and Gareth Skewis—and, much later, Blondey McCoy. By the late-2000s, Tanju and some of his other skateboarder friends were living together in a “filthy” apartment in Waterloo, not far from the aforementioned Southbank spot. They referred to it, ironically, as a palace, and spent most of their time skating, drinking and generally enjoying life. It was during those years that Tanju’s crew referred to itself—and became known as—the Palace Wayward Boys’ Choir.

“I had a gap decade after college,” Tanju told Glasscord Magazine, of those years. Though, that’s a bit self-deprecating when you consider that in Tanju’s supposed “gap years”, he was designing skate decks for some of his friends and producing “PWBC News” videos made up of an amalgam of skate clips, interspersed with footage from everyday life. In 2009, when these two things converged—designing and celebrating authentic skate culture—Tanju decided that he wanted to launch his own skate brand, with his close friend Gareth Skewis. Skewis might best be known to those outside the immediate skate world for his role with Palace, but in the skate world, he’s known as a co-owner of Slam City Skates, one of the most important skate shops in the world. Suffice to say that Tanju could’ve ended up with a worse business partner than Skewis.

Given the Palace Wayward Boys’ Choir existing profile in London, Tanju and Skewis naturally settled on Palace as the name for their brand. Next came devising a logo. Through a series of mutual connections and Slam City Skates hangs, Tanju had become friends with Fergus Purcell, one of contemporary London’s most successful graphic designers. At the time, Purcell was design director for Marc by Marc Jacobs, and had previously designed for Stussy. Tanju told Purcell that he and Skewis were planning on launching a brand, called Palace, and shared a fairly detailed plan for how he envisioned the brand. He wanted Purcell to design the logo. It’s a telling origin story that reflects how Palace worked in its early days and continues to function. “[It’s] quite a weird thing,” Tanju told Dazed, “like there’s no outsiders involved. It’s all best friends and we’ve all been working together for 10 years, from the skaters to the designers.”

Purcell’s eventual logo for Palace was simple, but memorable: a Penrose triangle, which, to him implied a state of constant flux and mobility, with the all-caps Palace word mark on all three sides. Fittingly, it’s been referred to as the Tri-Ferg logo since its inception and while Tanju today credits Purcell with coming up with the triangle, [Purcell points out that he had been told by Tanju that triangles were the inspiration for the brand in the early days](thefader.com/2015/09/03/fergus-purcell-palace-aries-interview).

If Purcell can be credited with creating the Tri-Ferg, it’s Tanju who developed many of Palace’s earliest hits—the “tougher” stuff, in Purcell’s eyes. When Tanju set out to start Palace, he wanted to create a brand that was authentic to the skateboarding culture that he knew and loved. He felt many of the brands weren’t engaging with things the way skaters were. Few things are more emblematic of skate culture’s ethos than reappropriating Versace and Chanel’s iconic logos. After all, skateboarding is routinely pushed to the margins—forcing skaters to make things their own. But, more to the point, it offered an honest statement that skaters were aware of the world outside what was seen as an insular community—the Palace guys liked fashion, too. Plus, for a nascent brand, few things attract more attention than massive prints of bootlegged designer logos. Palace’s very first mail-out featured riffs on Versace’s iconography, and a Palace-ified, “Versafe” take on the Milanese house’s medusa logo was famously worn by Rihanna, in 2012.

But the key to Palace’s early success goes beyond a few clever logo flips and a good logo. In fact, it goes back to the brand’s ethos of embracing authentic skate culture.

In the first years that Palace was around, the brand was stocked by a select few skate shops—including Slam City Skates, of course—and small independent boutiques; first in London and, eventually, elsewhere. Though the Palace boys were already well-known in London, the network of smaller skate shops allowed the brand to entrench itself with the grassroots skate scene. Next came a Palace skate team, which featured the likes of Blondey McCoy and Lucien Clarke, as well as other well-known London-based skaters like Chewy Cannon, Benny Fairfax and Danny Brady. In a sense, Palace represented a skater’s utopia: a bunch of mates who made money together (though Tanju admits they weren’t making much at first), skated together, and generally had a good time together.

In that vein, Palace’s early projects extended beyond skating. The brand’s videos retained the grainy, lo-fi aesthetic of Tanju’s early PWBC News videos and furthered Palace’s grassroots, just-a-bunch-of-lads-having-a-good-time vibes.

It didn’t take long for Palace to emerge as London’s emblematic skate brand. When Supreme came to town and opened a permanent outpost in 2011, the only other apparel brand stocked in the Soho store was Palace; Lucien Clarke was even tapped to model Supreme’s Fall/Winter 2011 lookbook. While customers and outsiders have a tendency to pit the two brands against each other, they’ve enjoyed a mutually-beneficial, symbiotic relationship over the years.

The Supreme co-sign, coupled with the New York brand amplifying London skate culture allowed Palace to blossom as the decade wore on. The brand’s Tri-Ferg logo T-shirts, other graphic offerings and decks routinely sold out at stockists. Celebrity cosigns, like Rihanna or Jonah Hill (who’s played spokesman on more than one occasion), certainly helped, but Palace’s appeal was broader than that—the product and the brand, were simply good. Palace was putting out the right product at the right time, in Purcell’s eyes.

2012 saw the brand earn recognition as the “European Skate Brand of the Year” at Berlin’s Bright Tradeshow, which, while not the kind of accolade that customers are familiar with, is indicative that Palace was on an early path to success. 2012 was a notable year for Palace for more than the Bright Tradeshow accolade. It was then that Palace introduced its first collaboration, with British sportswear brand Umbro, on a football-inspired collection that riffed on terrace culture, but also England’s kit for the 1990 World Cup. The biggest achievement in 2012 was possibly the famous London-based photographer Alasdair McLellan lensing a Tri-Ferg T-shirt on Karmen Pedaru for the May 2012 issue of British Vogue. “I [couldn’t] believe [it],” Tanju told Dazed, speaking about the brand’s early success “one of my favourite photographers is shooting it, and it’s in Vogue.” McLellan would later go on to release The Palace, in 2016, which focused on the Palace crew and the Southbank skate scene. It was also in 2012 that Palace started dabbling in their own bricks-and-mortar retail, launching a series of “Pop Off Shops” that promised “posh new high-end shit”.

Palace built on that moment in the years that followed, launching a series of collaborations that allowed Palace’s visibility to grow exponentially. After Umbro, came Reebok, in 2013; Tanju and Skewis had long been fans of the brand. “We always wore those shoes,” Skewis told Hypebeast, “You can skate them, you can wear them to the pub.” In at least one sense it was the Palace crew distilled into footwear: fit for a sesh at Southbank and another one on the town. Then came the Tate Britain, one of the most respected and visited art museums in the world, which commissioned Palace to create a series of skate decks inspired by the artist John Martin. By the middle of the decade that “posh new high-end shit” phrase from Palace’s early temporary store flyers was arguably the best way to describe Palace’s identity. From those early Versace and Chanel rip-offs, Tanju and company hadn’t been afraid to acknowledge and even embrace high-end fashion, all while making tracksuits and sneakers with Umbro and Reebok. Palace decks were on display at the Tate (it’s truly impossible to underscore this enough in a pre-MoMA “Is Fashion Modern” era) and being used on rails across London.

And then came an on-going partnership with adidas, in 2014.

Like the Umbro collaboration, the early adidas releases placed Palace’s Britishness at the intersection of skateboarding and soccer. It was only in May, 2015, after two successful releases of “teamwear”, as Tanju called it at the time, that the first Palace-branded adidas sneakers surfaced. The wait was worth it, though, with the the Palace Pro being Palace’s, “OWN SPESH ULTIMATE MASH MAN PALACE HIGH-BRID TRAINERS INSTEAD OF A ROPEY COLOUR WAY TING THAT SOME OTHER WASTE COMPANIES WILL BE TRYIN TO PROVIDE.” Or, in non-Palace speak: a unique Pro model, rather than a limited-edition version of an adidas classic.

Exploring Britishness has remained a central theme of Palace’s project with adidas, with no more notable example than a tennis-themed collection that coincided with Wimbledon in 2018—and, importantly, worn on court by the likes of Angelique Kerber and Alexander Zverev. That may have given Palace and adidas a taste for sports-related stunts as, less than a year later, the duo collaborated on a limited-edition Juventus kit, as well as training apparel and accessories—again, worn during a Serie A fixture. It speaks to Tanju and Palace’s shoot-for-the-moon mentality; something that again, is a testament to the brand’s authentic skate DNA. No collaboration, no partnership, no stunt seems impossible—just like any trick must seem possible to McCoy and Clarke when they’re skating.

In the midst of the brand’s first footwear release with adidas, during Spring/Summer 2015, Palace opened its first permanent retail location, in Soho, around the corner from legendary London brand Maharishi’s outpost and a stone’s throw from Supreme’s store. Again, that phrase—“posh new high-end shit”—resonates when thinking about the store: luxurious black and white marble floors greet customers upon entrance, reminiscent of the opulence of the Italian luxury brands Palace loves to riff on; that’s juxtaposed with steel pipe racking carrying an assortment of the season’s pieces; walk through the store and you end up in a room with a nice wrap-around upholstered bench, where you’ll find accessories, footwear, denim, TVs and a makeshift DJ setup. Depending on where you look, you might feel like you’re in a skate shop—or in a high-end flagship.

But do those two things have to be mutually exclusive? It’s a duality that Palace has explored over the years. The brand’s stores—quite literally high-low palaces—are exemplary of this, like the fountain in the New York store that riffs on both the iconic Belgian Manneken fountain and the Britishism of “taking the piss”, but so too are the collections that they house. For years, now, Palace has allowed itself to touch on things traditional skate brands have ignored. It started with the Versace and Chanel rips, but evolved to things like snakeskin penny loafers—paired, as only Palace could, with a track suit. It’s absurd, hilarious graphics, juxtaposed with absurdly technical Gore-Tex-equipped outerwear. Working with [Avirex], but also Pringle of Scotland. It's about being known for T-shirts and the Tri-Ferg, but also elaborate denim and intarsia knits.

In this sense, the comparison with Supreme is at least somewhat apt. Both brands are comfortable with one foot in the skateboarding world and the other in the fashion world. Lucien Clarke and Blondey McCoy are regular guests of Jonathan Anderson at fashion shows, and the latter launched his own brand, Thames, before eventually leaving Palace.

By 2018, Palace was largely seen as Supreme’s equal. That’s underscored by two of the brand’s crowning achievements, which illustrate the brand’s quasi-absurdist existence—and absurd popularity.

On the one hand is Juergen Teller’s recurring involvement in producing Palace’s lookbooks. Tanju is proud that, to this day, Palace is run by the same group of friends, they’re “just busier.” Clarke, for example, is still the perennial model for the new Palace collection. (This season, the brand’s famously witty copy claimed “Lucien was 9.5 hours late for the Autumn lookbook shoot”.) The one change has been famed fashion photographer Teller’s involvement in the lookbooks since Spring/Summer 2018. Considering Palace’s London roots, and the store’s proximity to SHOWstudio-affiliated MACHINE-A, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Nick Knight lens one of Palace’s campaigns. Honestly, Teller’s naturalist style is more suited to Palace’s aesthetic and the results have only solidified the brand’s weird, skaters-into-fashion identity.

Later, Fall/Winter 2018 saw Palace collaborate with Ralph Lauren. In the 50 years that Ralph Lauren had been around, the brand had never collaborated with another clothing brand. That it was Palace—a not-yet-decade-old London-based skate brand best known for its irreverent personality and antics—speaks to what Tanju and his mates had built. The collection was, rather predictably, a smashing success. Pieces like the Palace Polo Bear knit, silk shirt and puffer jacket may have been what grabbed people’s attention, but the entire collection was filled with pieces that merged Ralph Lauren’s trademark Americana with Palace’s quirkiness—patchwork rugbys and corduroy shirts with embroidered cars.

It would be fair to say that, in the year and a half since, Palace hasn’t managed to out-do the Ralph Lauren collaboration—with all due respect to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, whose playful prints have appeared on Palace pieces in recent seasons. That’s not a criticism, though. In fact, it underscores just how remarkable it is that, for nearly a decade, Lev Tanju continued to push Palace to new heights—that the brand continued to outdo itself. Going from Vogue to the Tate, Umbro to adidas, soccer and tennis-inspired garms to Wimbledon and game-worn performance gear, bootlegged Chanel to official Ralph Lauren. All while maintaining that skate-inspired, anything-is-possible mentality.

Skating is about more than doing tricks on a board. Palace is about more than skating. And, ironic as it may seem, being bigger than skating is what has made Palace the skate brand in recent years.