“My Irish relatives keep me grounded.”
Fashion and retail entrepreneur Colm Dillane, aka KidSuper, tells Marie Kelly how he journeyed from selling T-shirts out of his parents’ basement to guest-designing for Louis Vuitton.
It’s 10am New York time and fashion designer Colm Dillane logs onto our Zoom call from his parents’ house in Brooklyn, bleary-eyed with bed hair and wearing an orange hoodie from his streetwear brand KidSuper. Looking like the stereotypical millennial who’s enjoyed a prolonged adolescence, he’s both focused and distracted at the same time. He plays with the position of his laptop, meanders around in search of a charger and pokes fun at his mother who wanders in and out of eyeshot regularly, all while offering salient insights on brand positioning, his breakthrough into luxury fashion and his new Williamsburg superstore. His boyish charm belies a sharp business brain.
“Fashion is as much a business medium as it is a creative one,” he remarks. “If you take yourself too seriously as an artist, it’s gonna be hard to build a business. If you’re too one-sided, you’re probably gonna fail,” he adds matter-of-factly. So far, he seems to have gotten the balance just right, squaring off illustrious gigs like guest-designing Louis Vuitton’s autumn/winter 23 show with a series of corporate collaborations where he brings his unique style of wearable art to brand heavyweights like Puma, Canada Goose, Coca Cola and Jägermeister.
The son of a Spanish-born teacher and a fisherman from Co Laois, the 32-year-old admits that at no point when he was selling custom graphic T-shirts to his teenage peers out of his parents’ basement did he think he would enter the world of high fashion. “That would have been like imagining being the first person on Mars,” he says. “Streetwear was all kids wore back then; it was all I knew. Nowadays, a 15-year-old in New York won’t just be wearing a hoodie from Supreme or 10 Deep, they’ll have on $2,000 sneakers. The idea of high fashion versus streetwear has completely changed. It’s all blended.”
He’s right. Streetwear is now as much a pillar of luxury fashion houses as couture, and since working with Louis Vuitton, KidSuper has become the poster brand for an elevated but accessible urban-cool aesthetic. “Working with Vuitton changes the way people look at you,” says Dillane, “because you can be good, but people see you as bad and you can be bad, but people see you as good. Who’s wearing your brand is more important than I’d like it to be,” he adds.
In the past, corporate partnerships were seen as selling out, but they appear to have strengthened both Dillane’s credibility and his popularity; 5,000 guests turned up for his autumn/winter 23 catwalk show-cum-comedy show (he likes to mix fashion with entertainment on the runway) at the Casino de Paris last year causing something close to a riot outside, and Dillane has received several high-profile nominations and awards, from the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize respectively. He’s also been featured on every hot list that matters, from Vogue Business 100 Innovators to the Hypebeast100 and BOF500.
More importantly for Dillane, these brand partnerships cover the cost of his creativity. “Few brands without investors are successful, but I’ve been fortunate enough not to have to go down that road because of these collaborations and that allows me to operate on a more creative level. I don’t have to sit in a room with some shareholder and talk about my third-quarter sales. I can jump into Paris fashion week, make a record or a video, take a chance on something that doesn’t seem like the best financial decision but eventually pays-off ten-fold.”
KidSuper has evolved in recent years from a fashion brand into a moniker for Dillane’s various creative ventures. It sits at the intersection of fashion and culture and Dillane is the ultimate multi-hyphenate: an artist, designer, record producer, performer and entrepreneur. The first single from Dillane’s KidSuper Records, featuring UK rap artist Giggs and Atlanta hip-hop artist Quavo, was released last month. His recently opened 10,000 sq ft KidSuper dream factory in Williamsburg is a one-stop-shop for culture vultures. It houses an art gallery, a recording studio, a screen-printing shop, a retail space, a private bar space, a photo studio and his apartment. “Creating experiential spaces is now considered a smart business proposition but really these are just things I’d think were cool if I was a kid walking into a fashion store.”
Working with Vuitton changes the way people look at you because you can be good, but people see you as bad and you can be bad, but people see you as good. Who’s wearing your brand is more important than I’d like it to be.
Despite establishing what looks like the foundations of an emerging empire – he wants to create similar stores around the world – Dillane says he doesn’t take fashion too seriously and puts it down in part to his Irish roots. His father is from Rathdowney, where his granny and many of his cousins still live. “My family is as unaware of the fashion world as anyone could be so in that way I have a good balance of people around me. They’ve kept me grounded,” he says. In fact his granny is still waiting for him to get a proper job using the maths degree he earned at New York University.
Dillane believes that growing up in the States with an Irish father and Spanish mother has given him a unique perspective. “I was always seen as not very American because I travelled so much; we spent every summer in Ireland and Spain,” he explains. “In America I’ve always been seen as Irish, but in Ireland I’m the most American yank of all time,” he laughs. “I’ve become a New Yorker more than anything because everyone is accepted here. It’s such a place of possibility.”
Dillane’s unique perspective is revealed when I ask him which brands he’d most like to emulate. “Red Bull,” he replies. Not Gucci or Loewe but the Australian-owned energy drink. “I’d love KidSuper to be like Red Bull with really interesting marketing that just sells KidSuper clothes unintentionally. If you look at Red Bull’s Instagram feed, there’s almost not a single can of the drink. It’s just them doing backflips or skydiving. It would be really cool to try and emulate that.”
He’s also a fan of French luxury house Jacquemus. “He’s [Simon Porte Jacquemus] super-young too and he’s been able to build a very clear world. He’s been able to pull off these very luxurious fashion shows but the brand is still very purchasable and wearable.”
Dillane’s sense of in-betweenness, of being neither one thing or the other has become his label’s USP. KidSuper straddles art and illustration, high end and low brow. It brings whimsy to luxury and marries provocation with polish. Building the brand and its community has been “24/7, for sure,” Dillane says, “but the great thing about KidSuper is that I’ve been able to brand all of my interests and hobbies outside of fashion as KidSuper – I’m a big soccer fan so I designed jerseys with [Brazilian player] Ronaldinho so now when I go play with a celebrity, it’s work.”
This makes him more than just a good businessman, it makes him a genius, I suggest. He laughs and tells me his mother is shaking her head in disagreement from across the room. “Mom is a roaster, always making fun, never too nice,” Dillane says with a smile.
KidSuper may be flying high right now, but his mamá and granny Dillane are making sure this designer’s feet stay firmly on the ground.
This article was originally published in the Sunday Business Post, November 2024