For KidSuper Staying Creative is Easy, Growing Up Is the Hard Part
Words: George Voronov
Images Courtesy of KidSuper
Words: George Voronov
Images Courtesy of KidSuper
Known for his vibrant, playful garments and a boundary-pushing approach to design, KidSuper (aka Colm Dillane) is the creative force behind the eponymous brand that has become a phenom in the world of fashion. Earlier this month, Colm spoke to a sold-out auditorium as part of Irish Design Week. With November being Design Month on District, we caught up with KidSuper ahead of his trip to Dublin. In our chat, Colm speaks about the lessons learned from early failures, the tension between freedom and responsibility as his brand grows, and his thoughts on what it means to balance creativity with the demands of leadership.
It’s as if KidSuper has already lived many lives. Building his brand from the ground up, fuelled by an untameable and wildly prolific creative process, his past accomplishments include winning the 2021 LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize, collaborations with A$AP Mob, and a stint as creative director at Louis Vuitton. Not bad.
His infectious energy has powered a meteoric rise in the world of fashion. Colm does not quit. After being rejected twice, he took Paris Fashion Week by storm in 2020. Having finally been accepted, his celebrated Everything’s Fake Until It’s Real collection comprised of a claymation runway show that “featured” Salvador Dalí, Naomi Campbell, Stephen Hawking, Pele and more.
What makes the career of KidSuper so compelling are the many dualities that permeate his creative practice. As a child, he showed prodigious talent at both maths and art. Now, as the head of a fashion label, his intuitive, spontaneous spirit collides with the strategic mindset of a savvy entrepreneur (even if he denies being strategic). Crucially, for those readers who are themselves engaged in creative fields, this chat reveals that success doesn’t have to come at the expense of having fun.
No Reason Not to Try
There are a few interesting dualities that appear throughout your career and the first one that I was really curious about is your background in both maths and art. You spoke before about how, as a kid, your dad give you little maths assignments and your mum would do art projects with you. Can you tell me a little more about that?
Yeah that’s very true. But, you know, since I was doing both at the same time and from such a young age, I don’t think I saw them so differently.
I think people really divide it. Like, you’re either a left brain person or a right brain person. But I think mathematics is just as creative as painting. It’s problem solving. And because my dad was doing it with me from such a young age, it was a little bit of a game. “How can I figure out this or that?”
The other thing was that my parents didn’t give art this overly serious definition. So I painted because it’s fun and it’s just something I did. I still do. There are no rules.
And with math it was the same way. People were sometimes blown away by me being able to do it but for me it was in the same world as painting. if you look at history, all the great minds of the past were mathematicians but also artists and poets. I think we just weirdly decided one day that we’re gonna separate them and it’s a weird decision because I think to be a really good mathematician you have to be incredibly creative.
One of the things I read that gets at your symbiotic relationship with both art and science was that you said that the starting point of your journey into fashion came from building a Rube Goldberg machine in high school.
Hahaha. Well, for one, I love Rube Goldberg machines. I just like handmade stuff, right? Stuff that feels futuristic in a weird way but is absolutely not technologically advanced.
I made this Rube Goldberg machine in high school, probably freshman year. And then I was like, okay I have to make this cooler, let me stencil and spray paint the background of it. I was wearing a white T-shirt and I was like, “Let me try to spray paint the shirt, might be cool”. I sprayed the shirt and the next day I wore this shirt to school and people were commenting on it and I was like, “Wow I could probably do some more of this” and that’s how it started.
At the same time, in New York City there was a lot of stories of kids who had started clothing brands and there were a lot of clothing brands that had started in New York in general. So there was a little bit of inspiration or an air of possibility. I don’t know if I had grown up in other places would I have had the feeling that it was even possible.
And so after the Rube Goldberg machine you had your first foray into something resembling a streetwear label with Brick Oven T Shirts. It can be quite special to have projects like that when you’re young. You start doing something that you’re super passionate about but, ultimately, have no real idea what you’re doing. I wanted to ask you about the ability to fail that projects like that afford you. How do you think that early venture impacted your career?
I get asked a lot like “When was success?”, but my default mindset for anything I do is: “This is going to fail”. So, any little bit of success was an absolute fucking shock, right?
And so I was incredibly motivated and invigorated by the tiniest amount of success, because I was like, “this shouldn’t work, we know nothing, we’re trying this completely on our own and we’re super young.”
It’s kind of a weirdly liberating perspective. If failing is the worst case scenario but you accept that going in…
Yeah! Worst case scenario: I’m exactly where I’m at. Best case scenario: I’m a little bit further along. So there was no reason not to try.
Any field that I decide to enter into right now, I would have a leg up because of what I created when I was a teenager. Even if I wanted to be an astrophysicist, I think KidSuper would help in the interview process.
I think a lot of young designers think that the whole world’s watching. Literally no one is watching.
Maybe ten people are watching you right now. So if you feel like ten people saw you fail, ok, but ten people also saw you try.
If I Get Good Enough, They Will Accept Me
Transitioning from a grassroots, streetwear world into the ‘grown up’ world of high fashion was a very important part of the journey of KidSuper. I know you went as far as printing your rejection letters from previous fashion weeks onto garments. What was it like trying to get the fashion world to pay attention?
I genuinely did not think the fashion world people were ever gonna take notice of KidSuper. I did it as a creative challenge. It was Colm versus the world. I also saw that there was a little bit of a ceiling on what streetwear brands were allowed to do in the creative world.
Paris Fashion Week was my museum show, right? When you take a painting that you’ve drawn and you put it in your bathroom, it’s seen as just a shitty painting. But you take that same painting and put it in the Gagosian Gallery and all of a sudden it’s seen as this brilliant piece of work.
And so it was more about where the art was being perceived. That was the interesting thing about Paris Fashion Week, people there would take my ideas and treat them very seriously. And some of the ideas that I came up with for Paris Fashion Week were finally getting the recognition as really brilliant ideas which I liked as well.
But it took a lot of rejection before you got into Paris Fashion Week.
It’s funny. People always think I’m lying when I say this but when I got the rejection letter, I was like: “Holy shit. They’re looking at me.” That’s how I saw it.
I didn’t see it as a negative. If I got rejected from Real Madrid, right, and I got a letter saying, “Sorry Colm you are not accepted on this trial to Real Madrid”. I’d be like “holy shit, Real Madrid saw me play”. That means they’re watching me. That means if I get good enough, they will accept me. I wasn’t worried about getting good enough or having good enough ideas. I was just worried that they would never even see me.
When you finally did get accepted into Paris Fashion Week, you had put on what is now seen as an iconic show. Tell me about the stop-motion show for PFW.
Yeah so it was an amazingly lucky moment because I got accepted into Paris Fashion Week but then Covid happened. I had no money so originally I wasn’t even gonna be able to do a fashion show in person but then covid happened and I came up with this idea of doing a stop motion fashion show.
I could do this stop motion show with puppets that cost me a total of 5 maybe 3K whereas the flights alone to Paris would have cost me 5K.
Reading about that stop-motion PFW SS21 show, I loved that you had Salvadore Dali and Stephen Hawking as models because you weren’t limited by having to book real people. It got me thinking, is there anyone who you would love to walk in one of your shows? Who’s your grail?
So, here’s the thing. I got my Grail. I got Ronaldinho. And dude, that was my full grail so I now have to reevaluate my entire existence.
It’s like religious people getting to meet Jesus, then they’re like “what do we do now”?
Growing Up
I think one of the reasons that show resonated with so many people was because it was so light-hearted but also thought-provoking in terms of finding a new way to showcase garments. I want to dig into your ability to get people to pay attention.
In one sense, you approach everything you do with a sense of spontaneous, free-flowing fun but it seems you also have a calculating, strategic side. For example, I’ve heard you express different forms of this idea: “I know I can’t make the best version of this thing right now so instead, I will make the most original or most novel version of this thing”, and that struck me as crafty, strategic thinking.
I’m interested in that dynamic between on one hand being very intuitive and driven by instinct but also having a strategic mind. Are you conscious of that or is everything just driven by instinct?
It’s funny because I meet a lot of young brand owners or just brand owners in general that, when I speak to them about their work, everything sounds so strategic and they’re always analysing my strategies. And I’m like, “guys, I’m not sitting at home strategising”. Thinking: “this is how to present myself to sell more clothing”. A lot of it was just simple: some doors, were closed, some doors were open. It was very logical to me that this would be the pathway to success.
You’re obviously so connected to a sense of childhood joy which is crucial for any creative person to be able to tap into. But as you get older and especially as you get busier, I think it becomes harder and harder to tap into that source. Is that a difficulty you experience or is that childhood joy just like a fountain that keeps flowing out of you?
I would like to say that I work on it but it is something quite natural. I think on the flip side, the harder thing for me is to grow up. To be honest, that’s more of a struggle for me.
If all I had to do was just be creative and free-flowing, I would have no issues. The problem with fashion is, it’s equally creative as it is business orientated, and it’s equally independent and collaborative. And those are the things that I struggle with most. Being a serious boss and stuff like that. My nightmare is having to confront someone for messing up. I want to kill myself.
Staying young and free and getting new ideas, that’s easy for me. People think it’s kind of an act. And they think deep down I go in my room and I take heroin and I’m depressed and want to kill myself. That is not the case.
As I get older and more well known, the harder thing is to have eyes on me when I’m being a goofy kid and fucking around. Sometimes you do stupid shit and you’re not coming across as, you know, the professional that you’re supposed to be seen as. So, my employees will look at me and be like, “Colm’s goofing off. I should goof off”. But I’m like, “I can be fun and goofy but I really want you guys working hard too”. That’s really hard for me to manage.
I think you have to be honest with yourself around what your natural skill-set is. Managing people isn’t really my best skill. Inspiring people or leading people, I’m good at that, but not so much the day-to-day basis of…
Checking people’s homework?
Yeah there’s a lot of interpersonal skills that come with managing people. Or you can just be a nightmare boss who is also inspiring, I guess. Steve Jobs was famously incredibly mean but inspiring.
I’m thinking of the JK Simmons character from Whiplash.
Yeah. I mean that’s funny because I don’t understand that movie, at all. I’m like, what do you mean? It was a good coach and a bad student. He just had to be better at drumming. It seems pretty straightforward to me.
I feel that’s a real insight into the mind of KidSuper right there.
Yeah, no, I actually get into this argument constantly because people love Whiplash and I’m like that movie is so stupid. All he had to do is just get better at drumming.
So I don’t want to be an armchair psychologist but it’s fascinating that on one side you have this real easy-going side to your personality but then at the same time there is this pursuit of excellence that seems fairly full-on.
Yeah, I think that’s an accurate statement. And that’s a hard thing to balance because my personality is this free-flowing blah blah but I am incredibly harsh in a way. I’m demanding of myself and I’m critical of other people. You know, I don’t understand why you can’t make a joke but then also work super hard. Maybe not everyone can do both and that’s maybe hard for me to see as well.
It’s kind of the arc of any creative individual that once you become successful enough, you end up having to amass a support network to help manage your work. But, in order to manage that support network, you need an entire different set of skills than what allowed you to attain the creative success in the first place.
I do think that fashion designers don’t get enough credit…. *Laughs*
Hahahaha.
Yeah, don’t quote me on that. But theres’ not too many art forms, where you have to be the creative, the CEO, the people person etc. etc. etc.
There’s a lot of designers now that are working as creative directors for brands. That’s a very easy job compared to starting your own brand. If you’re a creative director, you’re there to be creative, right? And you have money, you have support, you have a whole team, you have management, you have all that stuff. You’re just in there: plug and play. Be creative and be eccentric, be all those things.
But for the designers that start their own brand–which, now, to get known, you kind of have to start your own brand because how else are you gonna get in the room? It’s really demanding on a lot of fronts.
Do you think you’ve changed much as a person as a result of having to grow with the brand?
I think I need to change more.
Hmmmmm.
Yeah, I haven’t changed enough.
Work in progress?
Work in progress.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
