The Manchester brand is putting down roots at 70 Tib Street, following The Sheep Store and the OG Oi Polloi into a landmark address.
Manchester streetwear brand Drama Call is opening its first permanent flagship store at 70 Tib Street, moving into one of the Northern Quarter’s most important fashion addresses.
The unit will already be familiar to anyone who visited the brand’s adidas Originals pop-up in May. For one weekend, Drama Call took over the former OG Oi Polloi store to release its third Superstar II collaboration, with queues outside, exclusive product inside and hundreds of people passing through. What looked like a temporary activation was, it turns out, something of a preview.
Now Charlie Bows, who founded Drama Call in Manchester in 2017, is turning the space into the brand’s first proper physical home. Rather than filling it with a few rails and keeping everything clean and minimal, the shop has been designed around the story of Drama Call and the city that made it.
“The whole shop is just Manchester,” Charlie told us. Inside, skateboards mounted on the walls nod to the skating roots that first pulled him into streetwear, alongside pieces from the brand’s own archive. A television plays the history of Drama Call on a loop, while a large ‘Up North’ light, the brand’s mascot and personally signed vinyl from The Smiths, Aitch and others bring some of its wider cultural connections into the room.
“It’s really f**king sick, bro,” was Charlie’s fairly concise review of the finished shop.
The choice of address carries considerably more weight than your average retail opening. Before becoming the OG home of Oi Polloi, 70 Tib Street housed The Sheep Store, one of the shops that helped establish the Northern Quarter as a destination for streetwear, skateboarding and independent fashion.
That history is explored in the Unity Radio article Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Untold Story of 70 Tib Street. It traces The Sheep Store back to Chris Hamer, who first opened in Afflecks before moving to Tib Street in the early 1990s.
The shop became known for bringing labels including Stussy, Supreme, Carhartt and The North Face to Manchester. It became a meeting point for the city’s interconnected skate, graffiti, music and fashion scenes at a time when very few places in Britain were treating those things as part of the same culture.
The Unity Radio piece also documents the shop’s important connection to adidas. Hamer is credited with recognising the Superstar’s potential as a skate shoe long before adidas built a formal skateboarding division, sourcing deadstock shell-toes and helping introduce them to a different audience.
That makes the building a particularly fitting home for Drama Call. The brand’s own Superstar collaborations have become some of its biggest releases, taking one of adidas’ most recognisable silhouettes and filling it with Manchester references, local language and the Drama stars.
Charlie says the new store intends to acknowledge the shops that came before it rather than simply erase them. The Sheep Store helped introduce a generation to global streetwear. Oi Polloi then made the address one of Manchester’s best-known menswear destinations. Drama Call now sees itself as the next part of that story.
It is also a homecoming of sorts. The brand held its first pop-up just around the corner using its now-familiar Drama Call truck, making Tib Street an important location long before a permanent shop was on the cards.
From a label founded in Manchester to collaborations with adidas and Manchester United, Drama Call has steadily moved into a much bigger conversation. The flagship gives all of that history a physical setting, on a street that has already seen several generations of Manchester style pass through it.
Drama Call’s flagship store opens at 70 Tib Street, Northern Quarter, on Sunday 26 August from 11am.
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Menswear Streetwear