There was a stirring strangeness to Kiko Kostadinov’s Spring collection, shown in London tonight. This upstart designer, now on his fourth season, has received early buzz and recognition. After completing his graduate degree at Central Saint Martins in early 2016, he very quickly received support from the British Fashion Council’s New Gen initiative. Soon thereafter he was named creative director of an unlikely British legacy label: Mackintosh, known for its traditional coats (the company will keep those; Kostadinov oversees a more “designer” branch).
Clearly, the man brings something to the table. And for Spring, he delivered a honed take on a dark, perplexing reality in 2017: that the “concept of evil has become entertainment.” It’s one of those sound bites that takes a second to settle in, but then it makes total sense and becomes a hard pill to swallow. Something horrible happens, news ratings spike, Twitter explodes, and so on.
The clothes had an American Psycho sterility and effeteness to them, and they moved from oddly tailored pieces to sportswear ensembles, some in a ghastly—but, then again, entertaining—“toxic” green. The opening look featured a skinny-trousered suit with a zippered blazer and sutured symmetric seams from armpit to abdomen. A clinical topcoat had slits through which a wrap (sleeves?) knotted around the waist. Then came a thinned-out hazmat suit in hospital-clean white. It all appeared mostly well-made and methodically conceived—see also a collaboration with Asics on footwear, which boasted a thin latex wrap in parts. Surgical and spooky.
There’s a risk in pulling inspiration from something so bleak, but Kostadinov didn’t glamorize it. At the end of the day, he designed a thought-provoking collection—with some pretty wearable pieces mixed in—and sounded an intelligent siren that pricked up the ears of many an observer. Watch this headspace.
