Daily Paper Returns To Its Foundations With A Love Letter To The Bijlmer

Daily Paper revisits the communities and cultural influences that shaped its identity with FOUNDATION, a campaign that looks back at the Amsterdam label’s beginnings while considering what comes next. Founded by three friends with African roots, the brand emerged from the experience of growing up between cultures and finding common ground through fashion. For its latest project, Daily Paper turns its attention to the people, places and traditions that informed its early vision, recognising the immigrant communities whose contributions helped shape contemporary Dutch culture. As the label enters a new creative chapter, FOUNDATION becomes an opportunity to acknowledge the foundations that continue to inform its direction.

Directed by Ebeneza Blanche, whose visual approach draws on West African cinema, 1990s hip hop and the everyday details of neighbourhood life, the campaign was filmed in the Bijlmer, a district in Amsterdam with a rich history of migration and cultural exchange. Home to generations of Surinamese, Ghanaian and wider African diaspora communities, the neighbourhood developed a distinct cultural identity throughout the 1990s and 2000s, influencing the city’s music, fashion and street culture. Many of the references that shaped young people growing up in the Netherlands emerged from these communities, becoming part of the country's wider cultural landscape. By returning to the Bijlmer, Daily Paper acknowledges a history that has often been overlooked in accounts of Dutch cultural identity.

The film brings this history to life through familiar scenes of everyday neighbourhood culture, from older men gathering with bird cages during the summer to the residential blocks that have served as meeting points across generations. These moments reflect traditions, relationships and shared experiences that cannot be separated from the places in which they developed. Daily Paper worked with local residents and communities to give the campaign an authenticity that extends beyond visual references, allowing the people who shaped the neighbourhood to participate in telling its story. The result is a portrait of the Bijlmer that recognises its influence through the lives of those who call it home.

Narrated by Maikal X, the influential Dutch musician known for his work with the pioneering hip hop and reggae group Postmen, the film also connects the neighbourhood’s history to the musical movements that helped define a generation. Blanche’s creative direction explores what home means to people raised between cultures, paying tribute to immigrant families who built lives in Amsterdam and the younger generations who developed their own cultural language. This perspective gives FOUNDATION a wider significance beyond its Dutch setting, speaking to the experience of diasporic communities across Europe and beyond, where questions of identity, belonging and inheritance remain closely connected.

For Daily Paper, FOUNDATION arrives at a moment of reflection as the brand considers its next creative direction. Looking back at the Bijlmer and the communities that informed its formation offers a clearer understanding of the values it wants to carry forward. The campaign positions heritage as something that continues to develop through the people who preserve it, the generations who reinterpret it and the culture they create together. By returning to the source of its identity, Daily Paper makes a case for moving forward with a stronger understanding of where it comes from, giving recognition to the communities whose influence extends far beyond the neighbourhoods they call home.