Inside Soulland’s World: Jacob Kampp Berliner on Youth Culture, Dubai and Creating From Instinct

There’s something refreshing about speaking to Jacob Kampp Berliner, founder of Soulland, because he talks about fashion the way musicians talk about records or skaters talk about spots.

Less like an industry, more like a world you grow into through instinct, references, and community.

That probably explains why Soulland has always existed slightly outside traditional fashion systems. Since its early beginnings in Copenhagen, the brand has built a loyal following by sitting comfortably between street culture, music, art, skateboarding, and Scandinavian minimalism without ever fully belonging to one category.

“When I started, that intersection felt more instinctive than defined,” Berliner tells JDEED. “It came from where I was spending time, around music, graffiti, skateboarding and people creating things without thinking too much. Fashion was more about what the people I was inspired by were wearing and how you could dress to stand out in your own circles.”

You can still feel that energy in the brand today. Soulland never really chased the polished, inaccessible version of luxury fashion. It always felt tied to real people and subcultures, to scenes that existed before algorithms flattened everything into aesthetics.

Berliner is aware of how much that landscape has changed.

“Today, that intersection has become more visible, but also more fragmented,” he says. “Everything moves faster, and there’s a tendency for culture to become surface-level. For me, it’s still about maintaining a sense of depth. It’s not just referencing music or youth culture visually, but understanding the mindset behind it, the independence, the experimentation, the way communities form around shared ideas.”

That sense of exchange feels particularly relevant as Soulland expands into the Middle East with its first regional store in Dubai, a city Berliner seems genuinely fascinated by, not from a commercial standpoint alone, but culturally.

“Dubai is often described as a melting pot, but what interested me more is that it’s a place where different identities remain visible while still interacting with each other,” he explains. “There’s a tension between global influence and local context that feels very active here. It’s not resolved, and that’s what makes it interesting.”

Fashion brands often approach the region with a preconceived narrative, arriving with the intention of “introducing” themselves to an audience that, in reality, has long been shaping its own creative language. Berliner seems conscious of avoiding that dynamic entirely.

“I think the most important thing is to avoid positioning ourselves as something that needs to be introduced into the region,” he says. “There’s already a strong and evolving creative ecosystem here. For us, it’s about listening and understanding how that ecosystem operates, and finding ways to engage with it that feel natural.”

That openness probably comes from his own background. Before fashion became a business, it was connected to graffiti and youth culture, environments built around experimentation and self-definition rather than approval.

“Graffiti, and youth culture more broadly, is about instinct, about creating without overthinking, and about existing slightly outside established systems by creating your own reality,” Berliner says. “That mindset stays with you. We simply work from the idea of what inspires us. Nothing is impossible, that’s the mindset we start with every morning.”

And maybe that’s ultimately why Soulland still resonates after all these years. Even as the brand grows globally, there’s still a sense that it’s being shaped from inside the studio rather than inside a boardroom.

“As things grow, we’ve actually become even more focused on being in the studio, creating, and having fun,” Berliner says. “We create for ourselves, and if people connect with it, that’s great.”

He pauses before adding something that feels increasingly rare in fashion today: “Not every opportunity needs to be pursued. Sometimes it’s more important to protect the integrity of what you’re building than to expand too quickly. We’ve never been in a hurry.”

In an industry obsessed with scale, speed, and constant visibility, that might be the most radical thing of all.

More info on Soulland.com