Another Recap — Patience over Productivity

On Lennard Kok, De Polder, and the freedom that comes from limits

Nov 25, 2025

A special issue to celebrate the upcoming collaboration between Lennard Kok, de dam foundation and Another. This collaboration launches coming Friday so if you’re in Amsterdam make sure to hop by!

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As Joachim has shared a studio with illustrator and artist Lennard Kok in Utrecht in recent years, we’ve been able to observe his working process up close. Lennard is a person of quiet concentration, making small decisions that accumulate into his signature style, along with his recurring experiments whenever he’s not occupied with larger assignments. We’ve known him for years, even before sharing a studio, and our first collaboration, “Fallen Bird,” dates back to 2017, when we turned one of his drawings into a porcelain sculpture. Since then, he has moved at his own pace. Never stepping into the limelight, just steady, careful steps that have carried his work into the world.

Bringing Lennard together with de dam foundation felt natural from the start. Their languages meet in the same place: clear lines, shared references, similar sources of inspiration. From that first meeting eventually came “De Polder”: a trench coat and a cap with Lennard’s hand-drawn work on the inside of the label. For Lennard, the project felt close to home. He grew up in a polder and knows its unusual mix of calm and pressure. Leaving it to live in Utrecht, and now outside the city, has not erased it.

It felt like the right moment to sit with him again. To talk about the years between our collaborations. To look at “De Polder” and the fit he found in it. To explore how the landscape that shaped him still shows up in the work he makes today.

Read the full interview here

Inside the coat by Another x de dam foundation x Lennard Kok

Here’s what was good last weeks

Lennard’s process (quiet, slow, deliberate) sits in sharp contrast to how most of us work now (note to self). While the rest of the world drowns in information overload (making us measurably dumber, according to recent studies), Lennard has built a practice around the exact opposite: constraint, patience, letting things sit.

The irony isn’t lost on us. Research shows that creativity requires what psychologists call ‘incubation’: periods where your unconscious does the heavy lifting while you’re doing something else entirely (talked about this in our boring episode). Lennard cycling through a polder. A walk after lunch. Time away from the work. The same week we published this conversation, a major study confirmed what we already suspected: a one-week social media detox significantly reduced anxiety and depression in young adults. Not because screens are evil, but because constant connectivity leaves no room for the kind of thinking we all need.

His polder metaphor holds up. You can plan and control everything, but in the end, it will crash or fail, and that’s where the truth lives. The constraint becomes the freedom. The slowness becomes the point. Subculture might not serve the same purpose it once did, but the need for slower, deeper ways of working hasn’t disappeared.

De Polder — starring Mistral Guidotti shot by Joachim

Another × de dam foundation × Lennard Kok
present De Polder

Join us to experience the project in full: space, sound, film, and the garments themselves. Both the coat and hat will be available to view and purchase at the event.

Exhibited at JUKI Amsterdam, 28–30 November
Launch event: Friday, 28 November, 17:00
Eerste Jan van der Heijdenstraat 103B
With a live set by Ruben Oosterman (De Rivier)

Hope to see you there!

🪟 Open windows

The always inspiring Articles of Interest on Camouflage has trends too

This nice trap to catch students cheating with AI

A psychic meditation program used by the CIA

The end of the line…

The book on black by Cloud 🖤

We know. Blackbird Spyplane are the coolest people in your inbox

How to Survive Menswear’s Sameness Epidemic? (archive) Just let people build their own style i’d say…

💿 On repeat while reading/traveling/working

Between You and Me by Ozzy Jones 🔥

KELLY EP by Kelly Lee Owens

Songbook, Vol. 3 by The Westerlies

Paradise Now & Forever by Obongjayar

Short Glow by DJ Pitch

(And as always, more on Record Club)

🎙️And these two podcasts to listen this week

How 21st Century Culture Lost its Way, with W. David Marx

Don’t Waste I with Tim Hooijmans

🔟 Times

To revive this little project of ours: In this section we’ll share 10 links, projects, people, books, or whatever it can be, that captured our attention over the last weeks.

We collect them all here (also with additions of friends, and yours if you like. Just let me know if you’d like to receive a pack, happy to send a few out again!)

This week: 10 fav magazines