Clothing designer Kiko Kostadinov is pictured here in his new Los Angeles store. Together with a Levi’s collaboration and a growing international presence, he is building that rarest thing in fashion: an independent, family-run empire. Photo: The New York Times
In the past year, fashion designer Kiko Kostadinov began to feel that everyone wanted to talk about one thing: money.
Journalists, store owners, employees in his studio – every conversation became about who was succeeding, whose finances are slipping, what mergers are bubbling out there. In short, who was winning.
“I feel like I’m on Industry or something,” the Bulgarian-born Kostadinov said, referring to HBO’s high-wire financial drama.
“The main topic is down, up, being bought. People don’t want to talk about the actual work or the design.”
He wishes they would. Since starting his label in 2016, fresh out of London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins, Kostadinov, 35, has been one the brightest lights in an increasingly dim British fashion landscape.
He’s a sartorial Dr Seuss offering clothes that are full of whimsy, wit and references that can only be called "weird".
His ankle-high US$935 (approximately RM4,150) Scarpitta boots look like something the freshest guy in medieval England would wear; his knits come in gelato-bar shades and have the texture of the plushiest bathmat in Target; his pants have so many pleats they rival Broadway theatre curtains.
“He does a very good job of making a classic garment a little bit more interesting,” said Drew Romero, the men’s buyer at Dover Street Market in New York, which has carried Kostadinov’s line since 2016.
Romero said Kostadinov’s clothes hit the exact right frequency for the swelling cohort of young, often-male consumers, who treat shopping as a spec-based exercise.
Identical twin sisters, Deanna (left) and Laura Fanning, joined Kiko Kostadinov’s brand as its women’s designers in 2018. Photo: The New York Times“They will inspect every single stitch," Romero said. “They’re looking at the way the waistband is constructed.”
Kostadinov is a clothing nerd of the highest order. He was married in a vintage Versace suit and has amassed enough Yohji Yamamoto to fill a studio apartment. Clothes are his sole fixation.
Asked what else he liked at the moment, he dryly replied, “Not much.”
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In practice, Kostadinov is the company’s CEO, although he rejects the term, if not the tasks.
“I want to be designing clothes rather than running a business and doing accounting,” he said.
At least 90% of his decisions, he said, are based on gut feelings.
In 2018, he showed eight womenswear looks at the start of his show for the Autumn/Winter season, a decision he now considers his biggest career regret.
“I could never be a womenswear designer,” he said. “I’m just terrible at it.”
Instead, within weeks, he hired Laura and Deanna Fanning, identical twin sisters from Australia and fellow CSM graduates, as the label’s womenswear designers.
“Dior has Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri. Why can’t we do it,” Kostadinov said, likening the studio structure of his comparatively teensy brand to that of one of the world’s mightiest luxury labels.
The strategy succeeded. Kiko Kostadinov’s womenswear is carried in nearly as many stores as its menswear, including Atelier in New York, the Broken Arm in Paris and Voo Store in Berlin.
The company is now a family venture. Kostadinov’s 54-year-old mother works at the office as a production coordinator. The bulk of the clothes are produced not in Italy or Portugal, but in Bulgaria.
Kostadinov and Deanna got married this past year. Their dog Dante comes to the office most days.
He and the Fannings still retain total ownership of the company. Theirs is the rare independent, family-run label to be a steady presence on the Paris Fashion Week schedule, wedged between properties of engorged luxury conglomerates such as Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton.
The label is rounding out a marquee year. In August, it collaborated with Levi’s on jeans and jackets that had hefty rivets and spider web-y stitching.
They looked like something the title character of The Iron Giant would wear to fashion week.
And this year, the company opened an office in Paris and a store in Tokyo. Recently, the final piece in its 2024 expansion fell into place when the Kiko Kostadinov brand opened its first American store in East Los Angeles.
Kostadinov, with a close-cropped beard and runelike tattoos snaking up his arms, can come off as shy, even aloof. But behind that restraint is a designer who craves more.
Inside the new Kiko Kostadinov store in Los Angeles. Photo: The New York Times
And despite his complaints about the fashion industry’s fixation on money, his well-cloaked ambitions can’t help but burst through in conversation.
“In the UK or in Europe, thinking bigger is talked down,” Kostadinov said of his brand’s westward expansion. “America is a totally different opportunity."
In 2021, the company began producing women’s leather handbags and added men’s leather bags this year, a clear benchmark for any would-be luxury label.
These large-pocket satchels and Italian-made cross-body purses are available at the East Los Angeles shop. Kostadinov also intends to start selling Japanese-made jeans, another beacon of upgraded ambitions.
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If there’s one way in which the brand behaves most like its competitors, it’s in its willingness to collaborate.
Even when he was still at Central Saint Martins and created Frankenstein-ed T-shirts with Stussy, Kostadinov has been an eager collaborator, working with Mackintosh, Camper and Fox Racing.
His longest running partnership has been with Japanese sneaker label Asics, resulting in more than 100 shoes, and since last year, Asics Novalis, a clothing component.
Kiko Asics, as collectors call them, look like something dropped out of Battlestar Galactica: shoes with cilantro-green checkerboard panels, mesh uppers in fiery yellow and orange, wrestling shoe-esque straps and Morse code dashes.
Henry Bouffler, 23, a retail worker from Melbourne, Australia, has fallen into the Kikoverse. He owns, by his count, five jackets, a coat, several shirts, four pairs of shoes (Asics and otherwise) and at least 10 pairs of trousers.
The pants are the prime target for him. He recently acquired his “grail”, a pair of three-quarter-length Kanu trousers that look like a cross between a jockey uniform and a jujitsu gi.
Not every pair of pants in Bouffler’s collection was so theatrical. He was also pleased to own the Kafka, a set of straight-leg pants with a tasteful cargo pocket on the front (yes, it is common for these collectors to know the pants names by heart).
“Kiko is a very good brand for people who want to be simple and very elegant,” Bouffler said. “And then it also has a side for people wanting to go a bit crazier.” – ©2024 The New York Times Company
