September 3, 2021 |
The US has never produced a winner from the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers. But this year they have three finalists! Dillane just keeps building on his 12-month success story, and although he may be seen as the underdog amongst the other contestants, he certainly shouldn’t be underestimated. The top prize is 300,000 euros, and the second prize – the Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize is 150,000 euros. For the first time ever, not only will the prize be judged by the prize jury featuring some of fashion’s biggest names e.g. Rihanna, Virgil Abloh, and Stella McCartney, but also the public – allowing Dillane’s cult following to support him.
Even though he is set to become one of the next biggest streetwear designers, this doesn’t seem to faze Dillane who sticks to his routes using his actual friends as models and only living 10 blocks away from where he grew up in the suburbs of Brooklyn, New York. It all started with a project in mechanics class based on American cartoonist Rube Goldberg turned into a T-Shirt project with these designs and Che Guevara blended over the top of it. Dillane and his friends would soon sell these to their classmates and passersby on the streets of Soho. What followed after was a chain of events that he never would have predicted. Leading him to be the designer of his own streetwear brand ‘KidSuper’ which was shown during Paris Fashion Week, has a collaboration with Puma and is stocked in Dover Street Market, Selfridges, SSENSE, and other high-profile stores.
His first ever show at Paris Fashion Week was called ‘Bull in a China Shop’ much like his approach to the fashion industry itself. Dillane has never really had a big team or worked within the rules of fashion. He refuses to spend money on the traditional billboards around Times Square or posters on high street shops but instead refers himself to Red Bull. They own football teams and a Formula One team which people may think is unrelated to the beverage unaware that it’s actually making them think about it. So he would rather spend some money to buy a third division football team, design the kit and call it KidSuper FC.
When the Covid-19 lockdown first hit, and fashion weeks had no other option but to go digital a lot of designers were racking their brains for ideas on new ways to present their work online. Whereas for Dillane, thinking outside the box was his bread and butter. He turned his runway into a stop-motion film titled “Everything’s Fake Until It’s Real”. Instead of using actual models he transformed 20 of his celebrity heroes into Barbie dolls and walked them down a virtual runway. These included Kanye West, Travis Scott, Elon Musk, Freddie Mercury, Quentin Tarantino, Bernie Sanders whilst Anna Wintour, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Obamas all watched from the high profile doll front row.
The winners will be announced on Tuesday 7th September. Click here to see the list of finalists.
@kidsuper
