The Kiko Kostadinov spring 2021 womenswear collection is written in the stars. The invite for the premier of the digital film by Esther Theaker is a starmap, a pentagram connecting celestial bodies around a central glowing orb. Were it not a digital invite transmitted via e-mail it could be mistaken for a philosopher’s map of the heavens. “When you’re by yourself and in your own environment, time can speed up or slow down,” says Laura Fanning, the co-creative director of Kiko Kostadinov womenswear with her twin sister Deanna. This idea of time and timeliness, with the star as its anchor, proved a starting point for the Fannings this season.
The twins began working on spring 2021 while 10,500 miles apart, Deanna with their parents in Melbourne, Australia, and Laura in London. (Here you have to wonder what effect looking up at the sky and seeing different stars at night had on the twin Aries.) Both homebound despite the distance, they turned to ideas of Victoriana and women’s roles within the domestic sphere. Their interpretations are vastly different than most contemporary references to late 19th century dress; instead of pouf sleeves and cottagecore twee, the Fannings settled on check and windowpane prints, simple cottons, and smocking as key ideas for the season. Big archivists, they referenced dossiers of museum pieces, picking up techniques from history and repurposing them for their modern clientele. The puckering seen here builds on last season’s pyramidal cinches, which are already being worn by all the cool girls you want to be around in London, Milan, Tokyo, and New York.
Victoriana also lends itself to starlit symbolism; in that era, the image of a pentagram signified a cultish black magick associated with womanhood. Tying that to the fondness for the symbol in the experimental ’70s, the sisters used the star as an insert on skirts and tops, as a rule for cutting (the top in Look 7 and knees of their trousers are both starred), and as the base of their new crocheted bag, which is covered in glass beads and cinches up like a late 1800s coin purse.
There are ideas that are wholly modern too. One is the knit leggings that appear in sweet pink and rich aubergine. “A lot of girls wear leggings around the house, and we want ours to have all the features that we would want, like the engineered knee,” says Laura. Another is their new multi-purpose suit. In images (looks 13 and 21 in the lookbook), it might appear as a blazer and skirt, but actually the jacket is a double layered piece that can either be worn with its long outer layer over a shorter inner one, or with the longer exterior tied in the back in a bow, lending to the jacket-and-mini visual. There’s little to say about the coordinating trousers with an ultra baggy draped knee—“it was like trapping a drape,” Deanna says of executing the idea—other than that they are brilliant.
While apart, Deanna started to knit up the duo’s new shoe: A lace-up kitten heel made with glass beads on black yarn. The preciousness and tenderness of the shoes echoes in the jewelry, a new-ish category for the sisters. Pearls are preserved in resin cubes or orbs, one half kept clear, the other dyed a CMYK color. In a season of exorbitant mailers—boxes of pastas, pastries, and who knows what else will be delivered to our homes—the Fannings had a humbler take: a small box inside of which was every fabric from the collection stapled to a moleskine notebook. Photographs of the clothes accompanied it, as did a hand-written note in blue marker on blue paper, rolled up like a sea scroll: “Hoping next season we’ll all meet again.” There was also a sample of the pearl jewelry, a single small resin ice cube, half pink, half clear. Inside was the rare double pearl, two spheres smushed together like a cell about to split in two. A winning season for the Fanning sisters? Maybe it's also written in the stars.
