In the past year, the 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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 $935 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 theater 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 Mr. Kostadinov’s line since 2016.
Mr. Romero said that Mr. 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. “They will inspect every single stitch,” Mr. Romero said. “They’re looking at the way the waistband is constructed.”
Mr. Kostadinov himself 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. When asked what else he liked at the moment, he dryly replied, “not much.”
In practice, Mr. Kostadinov is the company’s chief executive, though 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 percent of his decisions, he said, are based on gut feelings.
In 2018 he showed eight women’s wear looks at the start of his fall show, a decision he now considers his biggest career regret. “I could never be a women’s wear 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 women’s wear designers.
“Dior has Kim Jones and Maria Grazia Chiuri. Why can’t we do it,” Mr. 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 women’s wear is carried in nearly as many stores as its men’s wear, including Atelier in New York, the Broken Arm in Paris and Voo Store in Berlin.
The company is now a family venture. Mr. 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 his native Bulgaria. Mr. 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 like 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 “Iron Giant” would wear to fashion week.
And this year, the company opened an office in Paris and a store in Tokyo. Last week, the final piece in its 2024 expansion fell into place when Kiko Kostadinov opened its first American store in East Los Angeles.
True to his reactive executive strategy, Mr. Kostadinov said he wasn’t really seeking an outpost in Los Angeles when his friend Al Moran pointed the designer to an open storefront mere feet from his Melrose Hill art gallery Moran Moran. Mr. Kostadinov liked the space and signed a lease. Simple as that, he had a California shop.
“It was a happy accident,” said Mr. Kostadinov, who trusts Mr. Moran as he would a brother: The pair also run Otto 958, a somewhat inscrutable, streetwear-leaning side project. Its sweatshirts, hats, and shirts have become highly coveted by collectors of Mr. Kostadinov’s designs. An Otto 958 rugby, for example, is listed on the resale site Grailed for about $550.
Mr. 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. 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,” Mr. 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. Mr. Kostadinov also intends to start selling Japanese-made jeans, another beacon of upgraded ambitions.
“We want to be a bigger brand,” Mr. Kostadinov said. Just don’t ask him how big.
“I know I want to be doing what I’m doing for a long time, but I don’t say, ‘OK, next year we need to hit x number,’” he said. “The plan is to have good products and take pleasure in making them.”
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 Frankensteined T-shirts with Stussy, Mr. Kostadinov has been an eager collaborator, working with Mackintosh, Camper and Fox Racing.
His longest running partnership has been with the 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.
That partnership has provided a financial lifeline for Mr. Kostadinov, but he stressed that the company has never had to rely solely on the fees from these collaborations.
“I always tried to make sure that wholesale and our e-store can cover the shows and the salaries,” he said. “This is not a portfolio brand,” he added, referring to competitors who may hold runway shows just to grab the sort of attention that results in lucrative partnership fees.
The brand’s Paris runway shows, held four times a year, are the sun around which the entire Kiko Kostadinov company rotates. “They’re the most selfish thing that I do and my team does,” Mr. Kostadinov said. “It’s why we go to the studio.”
To be sure, the designs can be challenging: sweaters with peekaboo cutouts at the shoulder blades, darted trousers that pool at the thighs before narrowing dramatically, overcoats you can only open along the side, T-shirts stitched across the front so the fabric intentionally scrunches.
Those sharp-elbowed ideas have helped the label become collectible in a manner similar to uncompromising labels like Rick Owens. Kiko Kostadinov offers a particular look, but for fans, it creates loyalty.
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 jiu-jitsu gi.
Not every pair of pants in Mr. 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,” Mr. Bouffler said. “And then it also has a side for people wanting to go a bit crazier.”
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