Six black-owned fashion labels that made Amsterdam a streetwear capital

Six black-owned fashion labels are worth your attention in the Netherlands 🇳🇱, and every one of them is in Amsterdam: Patta, Filling Pieces, Daily Paper, ØLÅF, The New Originals and CRUÈL.

Between them they are stocked by Selfridges, Galeries Lafayette and END., and run stores in London, New York, Milan and Lagos. Four of the six came out of the same friendship group, and they got there by being turned down at home.

A Surinamese word for shoe explains the city

The Netherlands 🇳🇱 has 359,814 people of Surinamese background and 749,780 of African background, on CBS figures from January 2022, against a population of 17.6 million. Those numbers sit in our diaspora populations dataset, and they are why this list is what it is.

Suriname 🇸🇷 was a Dutch colony until 1975. The community that formed in Amsterdam afterwards brought Sranan Tongo, the country's creole language, with it. In Sranan Tongo the word for shoe is 'pata', and it passed into Amsterdam youth slang because enough people were speaking it.

Edson Sabajo and Guillaume 'Gee' Schmidt, both of Surinamese descent, met in the nineties at Fat Beats, a hip-hop record shop on the Singel. Edson was a DJ, Gee an MC and event host. They travelled, bought sneakers that could not be found in the Netherlands, and carried them home for people in Amsterdam. In 2004 they opened a shop for it and named it after the slang their own community had already put into the city's mouth, doubling the T so Dutch speakers would say it properly.

Then four of them drove to Paris

Daily Paper began in 2008 as an English-language blog by three childhood friends from Amsterdam West: Hussein Suleiman, of Somali descent, Jefferson Osei, who is Ghanaian, Ashanti and Fante, and Abderrahmane Trabsini, who is Moroccan. They interviewed people in the streetwear and sneaker scene and gave each interviewee a T-shirt with the blog's name on it as a thank you.

The shirts did better than the blog. In 2012 they released a collection of five and became a brand. None of the three had trained in fashion. Suleiman later put it plainly: designing a T-shirt was already hard, and they had no idea how to talk to a factory.

The problem was not the clothes. Dutch streetwear shops would not stock Dutch labels. "We weren't taken seriously," Suleiman told OneWorld in 2020. "We thought: we can stop, or we can go abroad. It became the second."

So he went with two others in the same position, Guillaume Philibert of Filling Pieces and Olaf Hussein, who had worked on the Daily Paper blog in 2009 before starting his own label. They got in a car and drove to Paris 🇫🇷. Philibert is the reason Daily Paper ended up hanging in Colette.

By 2022 the three Daily Paper founders each held an estimated €13m, and the Dutch shops that would not stock them were no longer the relevant market.

1. Patta

Streetwear and sneakers, founded 2004. It opened on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal and moved to the Zeedijk in 2012, where it still trades. The clothing line came in 2010, six years after the shop.

It is now among very few internationally revered black-owned streetwear brands, with long-running Nike collaborations and stores in London (2016), Milan (2019) and Lagos, Nigeria 🇳🇬 (2024). Alongside the label it runs Patta Soundsystem, the Patta Running Team, and the Patta Foundation, which works on youth cultural education.

The Lagos shop is the part worth sitting with. A brand named in a creole language that exists because of Dutch colonialism opened a store in West Africa twenty years later.

2. Filling Pieces

Founded by Guillaume Philibert on one idea: closing the gap between luxury footwear design and streetwear. Shoes are designed in Amsterdam and handmade in Portugal 🇵🇹.

Philibert is the connector in this story. He was a study friend of the Daily Paper trio, had already started Filling Pieces when they were still printing blog merch, and was the one who got their shirts into Colette in Paris. The brand has since grown from footwear into full ready-to-wear without dropping the construction argument it started with.

3. Daily Paper

The most widely stocked of the six, sold direct and through Selfridges and Galeries Lafayette, with stores in Amsterdam, London and New York and around 90 staff. The first shop opened in 2016 on Bilderdijkstraat in Amsterdam Oud-West, eight years after the blog.

The logo is a Maasai shield. Trabsini has explained why: the founders are the children of immigrants from Morocco 🇲🇦, Somalia 🇸🇴 and Ghana 🇬🇭, they grew up in Amsterdam, and they travel constantly. Modern nomads, so the shield of a nomadic people. The collections put traditional prints and Pan-African references into contemporary menswear and womenswear.

4. ØLÅF

Menswear and womenswear from Olaf Hussein, working in elevated, minimalist Dutch design: quality fabrics, considered tailoring, very little noise. Of the six it is the least interested in streetwear as a category.

Hussein was writing for the Daily Paper blog in 2009 and started his own label as that project turned commercial. He was in the car to Paris. ØLÅF now runs its own flagship and is stocked by END. and Selfridges.

5. The New Originals

Co-founded in 2015 by Eben Badu, Maru Asmellash and Rizky Lasahido, making performance clothing for creatives with a playful, concept-driven identity rooted in Amsterdam's music, art and nightlife.

Its flagship is on the Zeedijk, the same street as Patta. Eleven years and a few hundred metres separate the two shops, which is roughly the distance between the generation that had to import sneakers and the generation that grew up with a Dutch brand already on the shelf.

6. CRUÈL

An avant-garde house founded by William Ampofo, building deconstructed menswear, womenswear and unisex collections. The newest and smallest name here.

It is one of very few black-founded labels to show on the official Amsterdam Fashion Week runway across multiple seasons. It is here for the clothes rather than the retail footprint.