Kiko Kostadinov Talks Concept Spaces at Dover Street Market and Updating Workwear

Kiko Kostadinov is a designer to watch, with the buzz around him coming from his work with Stussy, his eponymous line and, most recently, Mackintosh where’s he’s now creative director. intelligence recently interviewed the 26 year-old about his brand, working with Dover Street Market and how he’s differed his take on workwear.

On creating a space in Dover Street Market:

I did it with a close friend of mine; he’s an architect who lives in Stockholm now. I had a few concept ideas so I drew a little one and based on the initial idea, he took it to the next level in the proposal and everything. So he came here from Stockholm to help build it, and we did it with my dad — we all did it together. It was very full circle with my dad. Inspiration came from my dad and then he’s there, and I’m building the environment with him. It was a very unchallengeable thing you know, you couldn’t ask me why I did that. Well, you could ask me but I’d have the answers and for me, that’s why I feel confident about my work — it’s not bullshit, it’s not really a fantasy. It’s just like we did this because of this. It’s full circle.

On who buys the brand:

My friends around me and myself. For now it’s just product that I want to buy, or the people around me want to buy if they have money, and that’s really it. Just building that kind of story around it. Because people around me mix it with other stuff, it’s nice to see how it reacts. I don’t know where it’s going to go — it might go to people who like Prada, or it might go to people who like Neighborhood and WTAPS, or it might go to people that like Vetements, I don’t know. It’s up to the customer. I am happy to see anyone wearing it. I don’t have a particular customer because, I have to say, I like clothing. I have respect for why I wear it, so it’s not like I wear black jeans and black t-shirts, or something like that, and design for someone else. I wear all the stuff that I make, so hopefully someone else will like to buy it.

On modernizing workwear:

No, contemporary, like uniforms. Because when I looked at stuff and was thinking about workwear when I was doing my MA, I was thinking of this rolled, kind of tacky Dickies trouser, or ’50s ’60s French workwear, like those blue jackets that everybody’s doing—I really hated that. So I was just looking for modern workwear. I don’t want to look at old stuff; I don’t want to look at old clothes too much. I want to look at what’s now and what are people wearing now, and making my own version of it, rather than looking at 1930’s, 1940’s, 1950’s, whatever. There’s some cool stuff but I think that it’s exhausted. For my own portfolio, my own brand, that’s how I tend to work. You need to look back a lot, maybe 20% in the past and 80% today. And that’s why the Japanese workwear. They have amazing catalogs that are really funny that show this. Because their stuff is cut with function, they have all these gussets, all these bends and the fabric that they use. So they have all these funny photos where they move and show the moves, and they have these weird colours like lime green, and yeah, it’s beautiful and it just felt really fresh. I thought that’s something I want to look into. So I ordered a lot of stuff and started copying out some of them and mixing them together — like started styling them — and then from styling, it becomes a completely different garment. Like it’s a shirt, then you wrap another shirt on the front and it becomes a different garment, it becomes a shirt with an extended front and another layer, things like that. It becomes a completely new thing instead of “Yeah, lets just copy this and copy that.” I just don’t feel challenged by that.

Read the full interview here.