Hidden on a side street behind Père-Lachaise, Paris’s largest cemetery and perhaps the most visited necropolis in the world, Colm Dillane, aka KidSuper, stood in the cyclone center of a studio littered with clothes, bags, shoes and props. packed with models, stylists, photographers, videographers, the parents of the designer and rapper Lil Tjay. Mr. Dillane looked for all the world like a man whose fashion show would take place far away in the future, and not the next evening.
“How are you, what’s good?” Lil Tjay asked Mr. Dillane. The question was rhetorical. Lil Tjay, whose given name is Tione Jayden Merritt, knew the answer before Mr. Dillane opened his mouth.
“It’s all cool,” said the designer. Of course it was.
While some in fashion prefer to work in a semi-clinical environment, surrounded by assistants in white, and others delegate to remote teams in solitude, Mr. Dillane the embodiment of crowdsourced creativity.
If anyone around him, be it Wisdom Kaye, his stylist, or his 21-year-old assistant Clara West, who recently graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, has a good idea, his ears are open. If a concept looks like it could fail, he will improvise. For example, if the 6-foot-2 model who will wear a headless costume figure at a fashion show designed in collaboration with the entertainment megalith Cirque du Soleil has legs that are too long for the samples available, order a pair that’ was suffocated at night.
“I’m not sure what we’re going to do with the feet,” Mr. Dillane said, referring to model Kaylann Balde’s size 12 shoes.
“Don’t worry about it,” one employee said. “We’ll figure it out.”
Improvisation is a default for Mr. Dillane. He comes from nowhere as a Brooklyn Tech geek who went from selling T-shirts out of his dorm room at New York University to building a thriving streetwear brand and finds himself competing against the biggest names in fashion on the most competitive stage. . The cliché has always held that moxie is a New Yorker’s superpower, the ultimate flex.
Whether that is still the case, the reality is that Mr. Dillane, without any formal training and only with his abundant reserve of ideas and motivations to propel him forward, has so far managed to organize eleven fashion shows – two off the official calendar in Paris, one off-calendar in his hometown, four on the official selection of Paris Fashion Week and four films, also presented in Paris during the Covid-19 lockdown. One of these was a claymation-style stop-motion film featuring miniature replicas of famous figures.
It was most likely that film that brought him to the attention of the judges of the LVMH Awards, who awarded him the prestigious Karl Lagerfeld Prize in 2021. That in turn brought him to the attention of LVMH, who presented Mr Dillane with the award. creative reins at Louis Vuitton for the label’s second presentation after the death of designer Virgil Abloh.
“One thing I learned at LV is that they were as unprepared as I was,” Mr. Dillane said Friday, as models from a casting call that yielded more than 400 potential candidates for 31 available spots rushed into the studio. “Two days after the big LV show there was no choreography. They were cold about it. The difference is that they had money. They can throw money and people everywhere.”
What KidSuper has is talent and atmosphere. That’s why shows like the ones scheduled for Saturday evening tend to attract celebrities, ballers and the hip-hop elite. That’s why models leave big money jobs to work for him.
“We have no problems getting models at all,” said casting director Maxime Valentini. “Everyone wants to work for Colm because of his energy. Models even try to crash the castings.”
“Fashion is like a Trojan horse for all these other concepts,” says Mr. Dillane, who considers himself a multimedia artist and who has variously staged shows that imitate comedy and star real comics; a filmed “docuseries” about his life; a fake art auction; and a short vignette inspired by Wes Anderson. It was entitled: ‘If the plan doesn’t work, you’re crazy, and if the plan works, you’re a genius.’
Whether his latest effort will be considered brilliant or crazy remains to be seen. Still, the elements are coming together, he said. He had already constructed a pair of gigantic hands using 3D printers and choreographed a presentation with eight circus artists who will be manipulated on the stage of the Le Trianon theater as if they were puppets. Earlier this week, he rehearsed the show’s opening scene with a hair-hanging artist.
“She’s got her hair up and the hands are lifting her onto the stage like she’s hanging on a string,” Mr. Dillane said, abruptly taking off his T-shirt and walking around half-dressed. “I’ve always loved that idea of fashion and puppetry.”
