“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: Boring. Everything’s already happened. Nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again.”
A thrilling film by Robi Rodriguez prefaced Kiko Kostadinov’s password-protected spring 2021 menswear show, where models spoke directly to camera, carried each other along the long Gothic Revival rooms of England’s Strawberry Hill House, and recited this sort of provocative statement, meant, maybe, to rile up the fashion crowd that has turned Kostadinov into a petit prince of menswear.
Kostadinov, on the other side of a delightful 2-hour Zoom call yesterday, explained he had given Rodriguez carte blanche for the film, and was not keen to explain it or meditate on it. It speaks for itself. But it’s hard not to draw a connection between the messages—another: “Consumerism is honest and teaches us that everything good has a barcode”—and recent happenings in Kostadinov’s life and business. Over quarantine he launched his own e-commerce and moved offices to a larger space with its own photo studio which will help him build this branch of his company. At one point he offhandedly said, “if we make it through this,” as he projected the future, alluding to the ephemerality of his business. Being a young designer in today’s world means holding it all together by a thread—I hope he makes it, because his threads are among the most thoughtful, riveting, and challenging in the menswear world. (And womenswear, too, thanks to designers Laura and Deanna Fanning.)
This collection is titled Sirokkó, a reference to the wind that blows from Northern Africa through the Mediterranean to Italy. (The idea came to Kostadinov while listening to a 2010 GHE20 G0TH1K mixtape called “Banging Bells of Hell.”) Florence, in particular, became a focal point through the Medicis and the 1973 Roberto Rossellini film L’età di Cosimo de Medici that Kostadiov VPN’ed his way into watching on the Criterion Channel. This is just the tip of the iceberg of his research, he says. He sees “designing and making the clothes as a means to research and educate myself and my team.” Here, the Kiko family became experts in 15th- and 16th-century dress, the hats and slender trousers of court bands and jesters, the blouson shapes of aristocratic portraiture, the rich jewel box colors of Renaissance masters. Silhouette is the core of this work; the linings of slim jackets bubble outwards through slashes and seams, ultra-slim jersey pants are worn with shapely tunics, coats tuck around the body like a cocoon in a crinkled material, and giant tote bags hang like slings, stuffed with wonders Kostadinov’s imagined Cosimos, Giovannis, and Pieros might have gathered up from travels around the world.
Two of the most outstanding ideas: Velvet capelets that metamorphose through holes in the front pockets to be worn up-shoulder and unzipped, a sort of dementedly elegant take on swag portraiture-meets-sporting apparel. The other is a lapis lazuli suit, made from a pebbled Italian fabric. The factory only had six or seven meters of the material, and so, much like the origins of Marine Blue oil paint, this had to be used sparingly. The ensemble it colors is a jacket with foldable lapel trimmed in black passementerie braiding worn with a paintball-trouser-turned suit pant with exposed yellow lining at the knees. Sensitive, unmissable armor. Another point-front pant allows for similar transformative properties, with its cuffs able to be buttoned up. In total, the multiplicity of each of these garments might be one of the most exciting elements of this collection: Nothing is static, the potential to evolve each article of clothing is almost infinite.
For the first time, Kostadinov has created his own footwear. The square toed boots come in lovely shades of evergreen and eggplant, adorned with a slit pattern to mimic the clothing’s busting out of linings or a flower motif pulled from a Victorian earring Kostadinov found on Etsy.
So nothing new will happen again? Doesn’t seem like it! For a collection so rooted in the past, this one is so progressively futuristic it feels almost entirely new. Ahead of its time is maybe the right phrase—and to be able to work with such freedom of thought amidst a pandemic speaks volumes to Kostadinov’s potential.
There’s also this: Reflecting on the transference of power in a monarchy, and the idea of princes becoming kings in an “unexcited receiving of power,” Kostadinov said, “If you’re a prince, you become a king. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not, you have to do it.” Presenting his collection on the same day of digital fashion shows from Rick Owens and Yohji Yamamoto, Kostadinov seems well positioned to inherit the empire. Whether he wants it or not, he may just have to accept wearing the crown in the future.
