Meet the Dutch menswear label that marries street style with designer fashion.

In the past few seasons, the worlds of streetwear and designer fashion have come closer together. Louis Vuitton’s recent collaboration with cult New York label Supreme is the most obvious example. But even before that collection stampeded across social media and helped LV’s parent company LVMH post an impressive 23 per cent increase in profits last month, we were witnessing the rise and rise of several lesser-known skate and street brands that now seem to be everywhere. In London, there’s Palace Skateboards. In Bordeaux and Paris, there’s Magenta. And in Amsterdam, there’s Pop Trading Company.

Pop Trading Company was started in 2013 by Messrs Peter Kolks and Ric van Rest. Before that, Mr Kolks, a longtime skater, worked as a buyer for the main skate shop in his home town of Arnhem. “Eleven years ago, skateboarding wasn’t what it is now – you know, as connected to fashion. We turned the shop into more of a boutique skate shop selling streetwear brands such as Nike SB, Stüssy, A.P.C. and Norse Projects,” he says. Naturally, this experience came in handy when he moved to Amsterdam to start Pop as a distribution company. Back then, its main activity was working with the hallowed brands mentioned above, acting as a point of contact in Europe and placing their wares in stores. But there was always more to it. “We used to do a lot of events and making videos,” says Mr Kolks. “When we began Pop, we started our own team straightaway, doing the same thing. So basically just really pushing the Amsterdam scene.”

Taking its name from a skating term (a pop is when you strike the tail of the board on the ground to make it shoot upwards), Pop – via its pop-up stores, events and videos – soon became a focal point for the city’s street skate scene, particularly when the local skate park closed. “Coming from the country, I always thought the Amsterdam scene was really advanced and people were really well dressed, kind of like the New York scene,” says Mr Kolks. “But when we started in Amsterdam, the street skate scene was hardly alive. It all revolved around the indoor skate park. Now [it was gone] there wasn’t really a hub for people to meet, and the scene became splintered. And that’s when we were starting to come up doing events in a different way and supporting these local kids, not only from Amsterdam, but also other parts of Netherlands and Belgium. It was basically us giving back to the skateboarding scene that had been such a big part of our lives.”

Central to this community feeling was the Pop Trading Company Skate Team, whose members’ style and skills are continually promoted by the cool, sharp black and white videos Pop creates and posts online. “That is all about us supporting people who were like the underdogs, but who have interesting personalities with their own good style,” says Mr Kolks. “It was about building something with them, and that’s really how we started.”

How did the company move from distribution into apparel? “We’d been working with Palace and Magenta, so had been promoting those brands through our skate team but had never really thought of making anything ourselves,” says Mr Kolks. “We’d been investing slowly into the company and then at one point Palace pulled out their whole apparel distribution. I had been working with the Dutch artist Parra, who also has his own clothing line, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you guys should do your own stuff.’ And then my dad actually said, ‘You already have the whole set-up: the content with the website and videos, the logo, the logistics and finances. You are basically a brand but don’t do any apparel.’ We weren’t really sure we were ready for it, but then thought, yes let’s make the Pop name synonymous with Amsterdam. So that’s what we set out to do.”

With helpful factory contacts from Parra, Pop Trading Company began to create the kind of clean-lined minimal skate clothes it thought the scene had been missing. “Skatewear is traditionally very street and raw, but both me and Ric had worked in menswear so had been selling brands like A.P.C. and Our Legacy, and were really into them,” says Mr Kolks. “So I thought, why should I and other skaters dress a certain way? You know, in big super-flamboyant clothes and all-over-print hoodies?’ For us, it was like let’s try and make something that’s more interesting. Something that, I guess, was a more mature way of looking at a skate brand. So we started doing something inspired by Comme des Garçons, Engineered Garments, Our Legacy or Dries Van Noten, but with a great knowledge of skate heritage going back to the early 1990s.”

Accordingly, Messrs Kolks and van Rest created a distinct aesthetic for their Pop Trading Company apparel. Its prints are minimal and restrained, and focus on the brand’s simple, sans serif logo type. Its products have a striking, unusual approach to colour. The current collection features sweats and T-shirts in deep teal, lavender and dusty pink, but beyond that avoid unnecessary embellishment. Even more important than the brand’s look, is that it means something to the local scene. “You can make great clothing and sell it in all these different places, but I think the added value we have is the team,” says Mr Kolks. “For us, the individual style of the characters in the team and the vibe of our group – that is the brand. The way they bring their own interpretation to our collections is really interesting.”

To complement the minimal collections, the company’s videos are similarly stripped back. “Everything is always black and white with no music, and I guess there is a big contrast between the super-clean imagery and photography and the raw content with the kind of characters we film and the hard tricks they do,” says Mr Kolks. “And that really is the same aesthetic as the way we can portray our riders, either as kind of models in a studio shoot or out on the streets smoking and drinking a beer. It’s that contrast between high and low culture that interests me. And it’s similar in the way we can distribute through both skate shops and then premier menswear shops like MR PORTER. These contrasts really interest me.”

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