Hypebeast Community Center: Lore

Give me your elevator pitch.

Lore is a luxury brand centered around an alternate world. With each collection, you get a glimpse into this world through the lens of a specific region and occupation. From an apparel and accessories perspective, Lore is imagined as otherworldly workwear. Lore feeds its archive and uses a combination of tools to generate its visual language through tangible and digital means. These tools include analog tailoring for garment construction, creative writing that defines the world and its inhabitants, and both real and rendered imagery crafted through photography, digital painting, and photo editing.

 

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The Five Ws

Who is wearing Lore?

These are handmade luxury pieces. The wearer should range from people who care about style and fashion to people who care about Lore and the story behind it. The collections are made up of both menswear and womenswear. There is a practical nature to our apparel and accessories — we want to create garments that people covet but feel comfortable in.

What is Lore's main message?

Lore is about a play between fantasy, functionality, beauty, and world-building. It is about creating transformative pieces that can take people into this world, whether they do so with a single garment or an entire Lore look. We intend to create styles that don't require you to fully understand this world in order to feel its influence.

"We created Lore because we wanted to magnify the fashion world's sense of fantasy."

When did you launch Lore?

In March 2025, we soft-launched with an event at WSA during NYFW. The event featured our first capsule paired with an immersive experience showcasing the region for which the capsule was named, “Undergate: The Silver Plains."

Where are people wearing Lore?

Capsules are currently non-seasonal, but hint at a standard RTW range, and our capsule wardrobing is designed to be cumulative. Even with all of the narrative behind each look, the idea is peculiarly achieved through fictionally functional elements, but without inhibiting fit, comfort, or modernity.

Why was Lore created?

We created Lore because we wanted to magnify the fashion world's sense of fantasy. We felt there was this emotional aspect to it as well, something we felt but couldn’t find in the luxury market. It's this sensation where you want to participate in Lore and collect it for nostalgic purposes that you can’t quite explain. And then it’s our job to make the pieces easy to covet and exciting to a range of people who care about the stories we aim to tell.

About The Brand

What was the spark that catalyzed the creation of Lore?

Early on in my footwear design career, I started incorporating fantastical elements into my designs. I realized that functional solutions in footwear plateaued at a much lower level than the stories of that function. There was so much fun to be had in the gap between a practical brief and having a design scream about the problem you were solving. So, I would tell the stories of these solutions with my design.

They were exaggerations that were born from functional elements. This idea of using utility as a design brief to explore and play is at the center of Lore, and it quickly became apparent that I would need to expand my canvas into apparel and expand my resources into a team focused on this pursuit.

When did fashion design become a passion for you, and on top of that, an intended career path?

Storytelling has always sat at the center of creation for me. From a young age, I was fascinated by fantasy and a desire to craft my own characters, creatures, and worlds through drawing and writing. As I grew up, I found that the path of an illustrator felt too disconnected from my life, so I moved into product design in college, which I found too disconnected from fantasy. Fashion entered my life through my friends and peers at school, and it felt like the perfect medium; it was both otherworldly and connected to my world. By my final year of school, it was clear I had found my path, and it has led me to Lore.

"Things feel intuitive at the moment, and we are embracing that in our infancy."

How would you define Lore's style in your own words?

It’s difficult to quantify Lore’s exact style; things feel intuitive at the moment, and we are embracing that in our infancy. The aesthetics follow the idea of fictional functionalism, where utility serves as the source for decorative storytelling devices that create new aesthetic forms. The technical aspects of each piece are executed in a way that feels analog, a sort of soft tech that focuses on tailoring techniques.

There are elements inspired by jewelry, such as the custom buttons (exclusive to each capsule) and areas that integrate chains into the garments. But at its base, each garment intends to warp the proportions of the body into that specific look’s most hyperbolic form. Customers can put on the bomber jacket from the Metal Former look and feel the bulk around their shoulders, vents that flare out along the arms, and a protective apron structure in the front. They get to step into this armor-like clothing and experience a sense of roleplay while wearing contemporary luxury fashion products, and it's a powerful feeling.

What do you think makes Lore stand out in today’s sea of emerging fashion brands?

Part of what sets us apart is that we are building this world with its own geography, climate, economy, history, and politics. We are creating a playground of inspiration for ourselves to explore, but it's really more about what this allows us to do. I am excited to see how far we can go without participating in the current cycle of trends and aesthetics. The factors that let us sit next to other luxury brands will simply be our quality, materials, and the relevance of our silhouettes. The goal of each garment is to evoke a precious feeling from the piece itself. We are putting so much development into every line, every gusset, corner and pocket. Right now, each capsule is only a handful of looks. We ascribe to a "less is more" mindset without being visually minimal.

"Apparel has a different set of rules that I am still learning, but I intend to break them as quickly as I learn them."

The slowness of historical garments inspires me, but for us, it’s being applied to a beautiful technical bomber with graphic shank buttons set with gems. We rendered these from nothing, and 3D-printed them a dozen times to get them right. I’m inspired by our complex patternmaking and construction that can evoke that historical quality, but in a totally new and innovative visual language.

In the new collection, we have these large external darts on the trousers that are used for wiping metal off the Metal Fuser’s fingers. Nobody is going to know where that idea came from, nobody is going to wipe their fingers on them. But they can love the end result. I appreciate the fearlessness that footwear manufacturing has in its development of detail and difficult execution, which has allowed me to push my designs to their limits throughout my career. Apparel has a different set of rules that I am still learning, but I intend to break them as quickly as I learn them.

Lore is already building a strong visual identity. What role do campaigns—and the visual narratives you create around your clothing—play in the brand?

Campaigns and visual assets are the portal into this world. To me, they can feel more important than the product itself. In fashion, imagery is your pitch. If your image looks a certain way, the brand will sell to specific stores and sit alongside neighboring labels on the rack. Instead, we are so focused on creating primary, secondary, and tertiary imagery that can continue to feed the Lore database and introduce this world to our audience.

We’re so focused on creating and answering our own prompts to better explain this place. I want the campaigns and visual narratives to really take people to Lore and immerse them in the lifestyle of each collection. I have found so much inspiration and joy exploring portals like this throughout my life. It can be easy to forget that when any of us started creating as kids, it was essentially magic. I want to capture that feeling and share it with others.

What style codes or eras do you draw inspiration from?

There are several layers to what we currently look at and intend to look at for future collections. The subject for each collection is an occupation, so workwear and uniform attire inform some of our more initial and structural codes. We take a lot of inspiration from historical design periods. They feel so disconnected from our world, and ornamentation is a large part of the aesthetics of Lore.

I really enjoy the playfulness of the Y2K era I grew up in. There is something that feels very “dress-up” about it that I find fun. There is a sense of that in all of our inspirations, and it is an easy association to fantasy. In many cases, fantasy attire is camp or gaudy. We aim to prove that fantasy can also be rich and impressive and that it can assimilate into daily life without looking costume-y or out of place.

What was the biggest challenge you faced when building Lore?

There is so much we want to do; it is difficult to feed our clientele at a pace that makes sense. It can be challenging to find the line between what needs to be quantified and what should be left for future exploration. We are constantly sifting through ideas, making sure we pull out the ones that are attainable at the right time. It’s a good problem to have. There is a never-ending element to it that I love. It will never be enough. We have created something daunting but also something that is extremely energizing.

What’s next for Lore?

Our first capsule, released in March 2025, titled “Undergate: The Silver Plains,” explored the metal workers in the region of Undergate. In September 2025, during NYFW, we will present our second capsule, which is inspired by metal workers from another part of the world. We will begin sales for our first capsule in September, with several pieces available to purchase in the coming months.

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