KidSuper will co-create Louis Vuitton’s next menswear collection

Announced this morning (10 January 2023), KidSuper – the colourful and eccentric Brooklyn-based label of American designer Colm Dillane – will ‘co-create’ the next Louis Vuitton menswear collection, showing next week in Paris. The move will mark the first time ever that a guest designer will work on a collection for the Parisian house in this way; in Louis Vuitton’s parlance, the upcoming A/W 2023 collection was created ‘with the participation of Colm Dillane’.

The announcement, however, does not mark a new menswear artistic director for the house, with Louis Vuitton clarifying that the line will continue to be created by the existing menswear team. ‘In other words, Colm is embedded into the men’s studio,’ the house told Vogue Business, which broke the story this morning. Speculation continues as to who will take the permanent menswear artistic director role, or whether it will continue with ephemeral collaborations such as these.

KidSuper to ‘co-create’ Louis Vuitton A/W 2023 menswear

Louis Vuitton has been without a menswear artistic director since the death of Virgil Abloh in November 2021; his final runway collection was presented almost a year ago in January 2022, and subsequent collections have been led by the design team while retaining Abloh’s distinct vision. In June 2022, an S/S 2023 collection was staged on a vast twisting yellow ramp, evocative of the yellow brick road that Abloh would often reference in his collections. At the end, the entire menswear team took a bow, while musician Kendrick Lamar provided an ode to the late designer over the microphone: ‘Long live Virgil,’ he repeated until the close.

New York-born Dillane – who counts himself as a multimedia artist and performer – began his career in fashion by selling T-shirts in his school cafeteria. This DIY energy has continued to define the burgeoning label, which now shows at Paris Fashion Week, and is recognisable for colourful, idiosyncratic motifs and voluminous silhouettes in an attempt to capture the ’the wonderment of being a kid’. Cross-pollination is central to Dillane’s approach, working across artistic projects, film and music with a longstanding collective of collaborators. In 2021, KidSuper won the LVMH Prize’s ‘Special Prize’.

The show itself, which will take place on 19 January 2023 in Paris, will also feature collaborations with filmmakers Olivier and Michel Gondry, stylist Ibrahim Kamara (a longtime collaborator with Abloh himself) and scenographer Lina Kutsovskaya. A surprise musical performance is also expected.

‘You never think a brand as big as Louis Vuitton would be willing to take such a risk,’ Dillane told Women’s Wear Daily. ‘I thought there would be so many rules about what I was or wasn’t allowed to do, but I was given the candy shop.’