Palace pushes into workwear territory with Dick Jewell and Buffalo-inspired graphics

The Danke Jacket and Danke Work Shirt were the pieces doing the heavy lifting in Palace’s Summer 2026 drop. They gave the collection real workwear weight, with rugged silhouettes that looked built for abrasion and movement, but Palace refused to let the gear go fully utilitarian. The brand laid artist-led graphics over the top, so the clothes read like skate uniforms that had borrowed just enough authority from the shop floor to feel tougher, sharper and more deliberate.

That tension is exactly why the drop works. Palace also folded in a Worker Jacket, Shirt and Boonie cap, plus a Wolfgang Varsity Jacket and other seasonal pieces, but the Danke items were the clearest signal of where the brand wanted to go. Instead of flattening into straight workwear homage, Palace kept its familiar graphic swagger intact. The result was less costume, more collision: practical codes on one side, street-level irreverence on the other.

The cultural angle came from Dick Jewell, a London-born multidisciplinary artist whose practice runs through photomontage, photography, filmmaking and book publishing. Jewell graduated from the Royal College of Art with a Master’s in Printmaking in 1978, and his long career has touched club culture and underground scenes in a way that fits Palace’s habit of digging into subcultural history rather than just borrowing the surface details. That matters here because the graphics were not just decoration. They helped frame the clothes as part of a bigger story about how style gets documented, copied and recoded.

Palace leaned into London’s Buffalo era for that story, and it is a smart move. Buffalo was an early-1980s movement that fused fashion, music, art, magazines and nightlife, with Ray Petri, Barry Kamen, Jamie Morgan, Mark Lebon and Cameron McVey all tied to its mythology. Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” later made that world part of wider fashion memory. Palace, founded in London in 2009 by Lev Tanju, Gareth Skewis and Marshall Taylor, has always understood that skatewear gets more interesting when it is speaking another visual language too. Here, that language was workwear, and the best parts of the drop came right where the hard-wearing shapes met the city’s most loaded cultural references.

The Summer 2026 lookbook first landed on Friday, May 8, 2026 in the UK, EU, US, Canada, New York and Los Angeles, before rolling out in Australia, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong on Saturday, May 9. Palace has done graphic-heavy seasonal storytelling for years, but this one stood out because the workwear was not a side note. It was the point.