October 25, 2024 |
The last few months for Kiko Kostadinov have been nothing short of a whirlwind. The Bulgarian designer, 34, has launched a Parisian office for his business, renovating an old corporate space a short walk from the Centre Pompidou which will serve as a base for the brand’s collections.
On the other side of the world, he opened his first flagship store, located in the heart of Tokyo’s Shibuya area, which is populated not only with the designer’s future-facing collections but the boundary-shifting work of contemporary artists such as Ryan Trecartin. Between all this, the womenswear arm of his business has teamed up with Marc Jacobs’s Heaven and he’s grown his Asics Novalis line, managing to squeeze in two mainline collections, and is already headfirst into the next one when we meet in May.
“If you’d told me five years ago that you could do that in 90 days, I would have said, ‘No way!’ The only thing that keeps us driving is moving the goalposts,” says Kostadinov. We’re meeting at the designer’s studio, which is spread across two floors in a warehouse space plonked in the middle of an industrial park in Wood Green. Inside his office, the designer is dwarfed by shelves upon shelves of books, mainly on architecture and contemporary art, as Dante (his three-year-old Lakeland terrier) enthusiastically tries to take part in our conversation. In the comedown of returning from Tokyo after opening the store, he admits to feeling uninspired. “It’s like Christmas when you open your presents and you are like, ‘What now?’ You’re already thinking about what’s next, when we’ll get another moment.”
from left: Ladow, Matthieu and Mamadou wear KIKO KOSTADINOV, Alexander wears KIKO KOSTADINOV
Working so hard on his AW24 collection offered the designer artistic refuge, as he’s spent a good part of the year swarmed with spreadsheets, planning permissions and all the “boring” stuff that comes with running an ever-growing business. “In between all the big decisions and big commitments, the collection was just something relaxing to do.” Following his SS24 outing, which drew on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ’60s short La ricotta for inspiration, the designer admits he grew exhausted of his method when building collections. While he has always looked to theoretical concepts, movies and literature, and the way artists live and work to inform his practice, he craved something different.
“We can’t just be making random collections every six months that are very self-indulgent, I needed to look at the bigger picture,” he says. AW24 was the first time Kostadinov allowed himself to be self-referential, updating pieces from his archive with new materials and modified development techniques. “[SS24 and AW24] are very different, like ending one chapter and starting the next. Leading up to the show in January, we were really thinking about what the core ideas of the brand are – looking back to look into the future.”
from left: Li, Artem and Abdulsalam wear KIKO KOSTADINOV
He dubbed the collection “an aggregate manifesto of gestures and forms”, filling it with artfully darted trousers, boxy tailoring that sprouted with a field of hazy florals and striped, ribbed knits, elegantly draped across the torso, that came in powdery pinks, cornflower blues and earthy browns and greens. With one eye always on tomorrow, Kostadinov proposes the sort of garb you can imagine people wearing in a different world not too dissimilar from our own. Think angular, belted jumpsuits worn with slouchy boots that could easily make elegant, space-age getups and felt crowns littered with metal rings, made in collaboration with Paris-based talent Noi Kamo.
Seven years into running his own label, revisiting old work is also a clever way for Kostadinov to connect with his audience. “I forget that when people saw my earlier collections, they might have been in their early twenties and now they’re in their thirties. Or they could’ve been 10 years old getting into fashion and now they’re 17 and starting to go out and buy their own pieces.” It’s a prime opportunity for long-term fans of Kostadinov to immerse themselves in his work again and offers the chance to purchase a pair of trousers, let’s say, that they admired from afar but are now at an age, or have the means, to purchase for themselves, just now modernised and re-rendered.
This change in direction is part of a lineage of agile moves that Kostadinov has undertaken in the last five years, which has quickly propelled his label from emerging-designer status to a flourishing fashion business, one of the most exciting working in London today. It starts with Kostadinov himself, who is quietly confident and unfazed when it comes to making big leaps, whether that’s staging four collections a year in Paris or curating exhibitions in Los Angeles.
Kiko Kostadinov
Growing up in Bulgaria, his uncle would send him Umbro Manchester United gear in the post. He didn’t properly get into clothes until he moved to London with his family at 16, where he remembers spending time trawling through stores like the now-defunct Energie on High Street Kensington, which stocked Noughties staples like Miss Sixties, as well as raiding TK Maxx for designer togs. Kostadinov wouldn’t start to get into the likes of Maison Margiela and Yohji Yamamoto until he turned 18, when he enrolled at London College of Fashion to do a foundation course in fashion marketing, although he eventually dropped out. He originally thought he could be a stylist and was excited about learning how to sew and hand-stitch clothes.
“That’s why I applied for [a BA in] fashion design and marketing, because it provided a safety net that’s not purely design. I could’ve moved into working for a magazine or consulting.” He didn’t set out to start his own label, avoiding interning at other brands during his studies. Instead, he worked for the stylist Stephen Mann, who commissioned Kostadinov to deconstruct a series of Stüssy tees for an editorial he was working on. That led to Kostadinov creating a capsule collection for the brand’s 35th anniversary before he’d even graduated. It was a team-up that brought him to Tokyo, where he was introduced to Dover Street Market Ginza, which became one of his label’s earliest supporters.
“People began to message me on Instagram asking me to make hoodies. I used to make them in the Central Saint Martins studio and ship them all over the world.” All of this helped Kostadinov put himself through his menswear master’s degree at the esteemed school, where he was doing 12-hour days in the uni’s studios. He says that he gets this work ethic from his father, a builder, who Kostadinov used to help renovate recording studios in central London to earn a bit of cash on the side.
From left: Adeleye, Fahui, Don and Baboya wear KIKO KOSTADINOV
He would stage his first collection with a presentation at men’s London Fashion Week before he completed his MA (skipping his graduation ceremony) and quickly received NewGen support from the British Fashion Council. His design handwriting was clearly defined from day dot, riffing on ideas of uniforms – whether that was medical garb or lawyer suits. “I’m drawn to this idea of branding through construction,” he says. “You don’t necessarily need logos or graphics. It can be a particular dart or the way something is pushed or tweaked.”
It’s easy to spot a Kostadinov look from their streamlined silhouettes, architectural jackets and trousers, which are both complex and utterly delightful in their make-up. “I’ve really pushed our trousers from the beginning because they can be as technical as a jacket, but the price difference between the two is massive,” he says. “I was a bit stubborn, like okay, I’m going to make very complicated trousers that are expensive and just hope people commit to them.” These creations steered Kostadinov to introduce modern workwear references into his repertoire, codes which have been transferred to the collaborations with the likes of Mackintosh, Camper and C.P. Company, alongside his work with the experimental label Affix.
However, it’s Kostadinov’s ongoing working relationship with Asics that has helped propel the label to global acclaim. The trainers he designed alongside the sportswear giant – often drenched in candy colours and featuring abstract motifs – have become something of shoe folklore (Kostadinov was the first designer outside the brand to be invited to design his own Asics sole, the cushiony spiral FlyteFoam).
from left: Ram, Konrad and Selasi wear KIKO KOSTADINOV,, Carl and Luke wear KIKO KOSTADINOV
“It got to a point that there were so many collaborations in fashion, people just expected them and it became predictable,” he says. The two parties made the decision to stop collaborating as part of Kostadinov’s runway collections and, instead, launched a joint unisex line, Asics Novalis, with a focus on performance-driven apparel and footwear. “Asics see that we really care about our brand and what we build together,” he says. “We’ve found a progressive way of working.”
It’s all part of the designer’s big-brand mentality. Despite being in business for less than a decade, he launched a limited-edition fragrance, KK.0001, which sold out quickly, and introduced womenswear into the brand in 2018, designed by Aussie twins Laura and Deanna Fanning. Both sides of the business share visual similarities but are designed completely separately.
“It’s questioning how current independent fashion businesses are perceived, especially in London,” he says. “You’re always supposed to be struggling, almost failing. But for me, it’s like, why can’t we act like a big brand? Why are we not acting like Dior, where they have men’s and women’s departments that are designed by different people? I remember speaking with a few people who told me it doesn’t make sense. I’m a triple Scorpio, so the moment that I’m told no, I’ll just push for it.”
And with that, our conversation draws to a close. Kostadinov’s got to head straight into a planning meeting for his next collection, to be followed by conference calls with his teams in Paris and Tokyo, having to squeeze a park date with Dante somewhere in between. All in a day’s work for a modern menswear maven.
Taken from 10 Men Issue 60 – ECCENTRIC, FANTASY, ROMANCE – is out now. Order your copy here
KIKO KOSTADINOV: THE ALCHEMIST
Photographer CHRISTINA FRAGKOU
Text PAUL TONER
Models SELASI BERNARD, ADELEYE SEGUN, LADOW MAKUACH and MATTHIEU MAYEUX at Run Model Management, MAMADOU DIALLO at Success Models, ALEXANDER ACQUAH at 16 & 16Men, LI DONGYANG at Metropolitan Models, ABDULSALAM ADEIGBE and KONRAD BAUER at Elite Paris, FAHUI ZHUANG, CARL FELDHUTTER and at Premium Models, DON NAHUMUREMY at Rapture Management, BABOYA PETER at Girl Management, LUKE CLOD at IMG, RAM KUMAR at Anon Models, ARTEM KHRAMOV at Girl
Date January 20, 2024
Location Paris, France
Designer KIKO KOSTADINOV
Hair MICHAEL DELMAS
Make-up KANAKO YOSHIDA
Casting HENRY THOMAS
