This stop-motion show was monumental for the brand, and I think it represents KidSuper in its truest form. I had done two fashion shows prior to this one, which were off-calendar shows. I had gotten rejected from the official Paris Fashion Week menswear calendar both times, and this is the first show where I got accepted. Those first two shows… I was very new to doing this, and I spent all of my money on them and they were very difficult to do—not that they have gotten easier since—but they were such crazy undertakings. I didn’t even know where to get models, so I had my mom and dad walk the first one, and the second was hilarious because models kept slipping because I created an accidental slip-and-slide with paint and plastic on the runway. For this show, I just didn’t have the money or resources to do a third one. I was such an outsider, and I didn’t know if it was working or not. Then COVID came, and we were all scrambling. The men’s Paris Fashion Week was the first calendar of shows to go up after the pandemic hit, so we were the first to do whatever this new version of fashion shows was. That’s when I thought, okay, this is no longer a budget competition, it’s an ideas competition. You can’t rent a palace in Paris or fly out a Kardashian or have a Hadid walk. I thought that if we were competing on ideas, I had a fair shot and that this might be my moment to shine. I have done stop-motion music videos and commercials for KidSuper. What I love about stop-motion is taking intangible objects and giving them life. That’s what the ethos of KidSuper is, if you think about it, bringing life and color and joy to the mundane. I remember talking to my friends and Florent [Belda, publicist] and being like, if we do this as a stop-motion doll show, will we get kicked off Paris Fashion Week because it’s not [traditional] clothes? But we ended up doing it. I ripped off the heads of Barbie dolls and 3D-printed all my heroes to turn them into guests, because everybody cares about who attends the shows, especially when you’re starting out. At that time I couldn’t get anyone, but I made Salvador Dalí, Jay Z, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Stephen Hawking. I even had an Anna Wintour doll. The show was a little performance, and at the end I made a doll version of myself to come out and say thank you for supporting a brand from Brooklyn. I said that people say that the fashion world is filled with fake and plastic people, but today they pulled up and we proved them wrong. I thought it was funny because, obviously, everyone fake and plastic. It ended up getting a crazy response. Rei Kawakubo’s team emailed me saying that they needed KidSuper at Dover Street Market, and Mike Amiri, who I didn’t know at the time, DM’d me being like “you’re a genius.” Julie [Gilhart] from Tomorrow told me to apply to the LVMH Prize, as did Sarah Andelman from Colette. I just remember being like . The thing that was the truest to KidSuper, the most left field, ended up being my most successful show. What an amazing testament to new ideas and creativity and doing it your own way. If you’re looking from an outside view you’d think that the fashion world wouldn’t support that. But peeling back the surface, this world does support creativity, and it does support new ideas and is trying to champion young perspectives. Fashion Week has since become a huge part of KidSuper’s success, and has put me in a completely new trajectory than when I was just making clothes in New York City. Every time I look at this show I go back to the mentality of doing this my way and trying super-hard and hopefully it works, and that’s the ethos of every show now. My next show in Paris [spring 2025] is now a kind of hilarious undertaking, and an homage to this show. It’s a bit of a risk, but hopefully it will work out.
KidSuper’s Stop-Motion Fashion Show: A Monumental Moment of Creativity
