There are two types of designers: those who dress in their own wares, and those who have a creative vision separate from their personal preferences. There are no wrong answers here, but luckily for all Kith devotees, Ronnie Fieg is in the former camp. He works as his own fitting model, and with each passing year he has carefully shaped the Kith aesthetic to suit his own: a man in his forties, married and with children, with a distinctive taste for fine materials, among other things, honed by over the years. His challenge lately has been the push and pull to take the Kith collections into this new phase of his life, without leaving behind the clients who helped him rise to the top.
He’s more than met that challenge – witness last season’s video campaign starring Adrian Brody wearing the label’s secretly lavish attire while teetering beneath his ineffable Adrien Brody-ness as he cooks an Italian meal and walks lines for a role…in Italian – but he still feels the pressure. When we meet in Kith’s sprawling Williamsburg office, that’s the first thing he mentions. “It’s been hard to keep going up, we have to push ourselves to always get better, even when it’s really good,” he says. “And last fall was really, really good for us.” He needn’t worry as he and his team are clearly riding a good wave. The first thing he shows me is a khaki lapelless technical fabric suit. The jacket has a magnetic closure and is reversed to black, and there are matching trousers in both colours. “I have Margiela lapelless suits that I really like, and that’s kind of become my go-to where it’s casual enough to wear during the day and not take it too seriously,” he adds. It appears in both khaki and black in the lookbook, styled with a simple off-white cotton turtleneck and white button-down shirt, respectively. They both capture a different energy: slim and elegant, with the ease of pajamas.
Ease is perhaps one of Kith’s prevailing feelings that most closely reflects Fieg’s own attitude towards dressing. The shirts and jackets are classic silhouettes; button-downs, hoodies, starter jackets, all made from incredibly luxurious fabrics that beg to be touched and explored; like a shirt in an embedded checkered pattern made from the fraying of some threads on the weave to create small squares (worn over an airy tone-on-tone wool sweater whose shade of gray was reminiscent of the graphite marks of a hand running over the pages of a pencil rub-scribbled notebook), or the multicolored striped cotton shirt that was as soft as a very old, well-loved T-shirt (worn under an equally luscious beige suede jacket, though another version in patched shades of hunter green really is one of the stars of the collection), or the short sleeve leather shirt, laser cut and embroidered with Kith’s signature paisley pattern, which is remixed and reworked season after season. Pants often have an elasticated waistband and drawstring, even if they’re made of double cotton jersey or tonal paisley jacquards, but the look is rarely “dressed up.” He wants to make Kith known for his indulgence in materials, for his textures. “What I say to the team is that we should always have these top pieces that are so textured that it’s clear to us,” he explains. “Like you don’t need the branding, and you can tell it’s us just by the look and feel of it.”
If this all seems very serious and capital M Menswear Fashion, it is! But Fieg hasn’t lost his playful side, take a hoodie printed with a photorealistic image of mountains with delicately embroidered flowers at the bottom; nor has he lost his love for Kith’s bold logo throughout the collection, as seen on an oversized leather bomber jacket with batwing sleeves in contrasting blocks of red and black and a bold Kith logo on the back that resembled an updated version of the classic 8 -ball jacket, while okay, maybe it was also a nod to the original Air Jordan 11 colorway. (Fieg may have been named creative director of the New York Knicks in November, but the childhood nostalgia for Jordan is forever.) “The spectrum we cover has to be a little broader than most brands because of the people we serve, he explained. “I started out in a way and as we’ve grown we’ve retained a lot of those customers. They’ve aged with me, but I’m not forgetting the younger consumer either.”
