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“I’m here to mentor!” Colm Dillane calls out as he saunters into the Brooklyn Borough Hall’s community room, five days before KidSuper’s ‘The People’s Runway’ show, set for Sunday evening. The designer is in KidSuper tracksuit bottoms and cap, a light blue ‘Speed does New York City’ T-shirt and Nike sneakers.
Dillane’s greeting is directed at four of the five emerging designers who will be showing during the KidSuper x Brooklyn Borough Hall event on Sunday evening. Dillane normally shows in Paris, but always manages to make an appearance during fashion week in New York, the brand’s home city. Last season, he hosted a comedy show. The season prior, a gala to celebrate the opening of his store-slash-community hub in Williamsburg.
This season, he decided he wanted to be on the official CFDA calendar. But instead of showcasing a new collection (which he did in June at Paris Men’s), he enlisted five emerging Brooklyn designers to mentor and showcase. The five designers are Ahmrii Johnson, Daveed Baptiste, Kent Anthony, Rojin Jung and Shriya Myneni. (Baptiste isn’t there on Tuesday afternoon, as he’s at the annual Harlem’s Fashion Row show.) The show is in partnership with Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso, meaning it’s funded by a mix of city support and external sponsors like prebiotic soda brand Poppi. In keeping with the community ethos, the show is open to the public.
Tuesday is the first time Dillane is meeting the designers whose work will be on show (alongside five of KidSuper’s existing designs) in person. He’s been on FaceTime with all of them, and they’ve been texting back and forth. Before Dillane arrives, Johnson, Anthony, Jung and Myneni are busy at work in their respective corners of the room, which is relatively sparse save for their clothing racks and some Brooklyn-branded dividers in one corner. Myneni, who has just graduated from Parsons, is fitting a corset on a model (who, like most of the models in the show, was street cast). Later, another model strolls in, carrying takeout and a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee. Johnson helps her get into a large, cobalt blue bubble skirt (“It’s really heavy,” the designer told us earlier).
“This process has been a chaotic joy,” says Bahamian-American designer and artist Johnson. “It’s been so much fun, but there have been so many moving parts.” She’s had a hand in all of the world-building, she says, from music to model casting.
After chatting with the designers, Dillane sits down with Vogue Business to explain why he took this approach this season. “As a person growing up in Brooklyn, you hear about people getting grants and support from the city. And you’re like, how the hell did they get that? How do you even apply? The connection between that and the real creatives is pretty loose,” he says. “So I thought I could be a good bridge, because a lot of the young creative designers in New York are following me, so I could be the connector.”
That putting on a show season after season is incredibly expensive is one of the industry’s recurring qualms. For brands starting out, it’s usually a pipe dream. “[Shows are] financially draining, economically draining, emotionally draining,” Dillane says. “So the fact that we could do this for New York Fashion Week with the Brooklyn borough president at a crazy venue — if you tried to do this alone, it would cost you millions of dollars. The fact that they’re getting to do it is really cool.”
Putting together an on-schedule show of budding designers, organised in partnership with a government organisation, is logistically complex. “Behind the scenes, it’s been a lot more work than people think,” Dillane says, adding that he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without Reynoso. “They’ve given so much, from the facilities to all the connections within Brooklyn that they have,” he says.
Business matters
For designer Kent Anthony, who founded his eponymous brand three years ago, the mentorship piece was a bigger draw than the runway show. “I was most excited about the mentorship portion of this, because we’ve been shooting in the dark,” he says. “We’ve been very scrappy, trying to figure out how to build this from the ground up. So as much as I am excited about the runway, I was more excited about getting guidance from one of the vets.”
Dillane is more than aware of how tough it is to make ends meet as a designer. He himself is known for his creative ways of merging business and fashion, with collabs with brands from Puma to pizza chain Papa John’s. In his view, a fashion show is the distillation of this approach. “I’m quite entrepreneurial with the art,” he says. “That’s why I like fashion shows so much, because they’re a combination of art and business. And I was able to use that to kind of fund these creative projects.”
This business angle is one of Anthony’s main learnings. “Making beautiful clothes is great, but I’ve got to eat too. I’ve got to pay rent too. There were a lot of really good conversations regarding how do we make these beautiful, conceptual garments, and distil them down into something that we can now make a living off of?”
Jung, whose goal is to build his own brand and business, agrees. “[It’s been interesting] to see the budgeting aspect and trying to [envision] a more sustainable way to do my practice,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot from the budgeting alone — it’s interesting to pace myself and see what the costs were for specific things. I think that’s really important.”
As well as Dillane, the mentees have spoken with Mike Amiri of Amiri and the anonymous editor of internet magazine Outlander (whose identity remains secret). Dillane wants to get them on the phone with TikTok stylist Wisdom Kaye next. “He’s like a Gen Z god,” he says to the team.
The whole package
As the designers prepare for Sunday, Dillane is aiming to impart wisdom not just about making garments — they all have the training, or at least the experience — but about the broader ins and outs of putting on a show (styling; world-building) and what it takes and means to scale a business.
It’s savvy show prep that has been a learning curve for the designers. “The design process is what we’re used to, but it’s all the other little details that go along with it,” Anthony says. “Putting on a show, putting on a production. I sat down in my one-on-one call [with Colm] and we really got into the world of styling, which wasn’t something that I had put a ton of energy or thought into.”
When discussing styling with Jung, Dillane flips open a suitcase that the designer has next to his clothing rack. “What do we have in here?” Dillane asks, pulling out a pair of headphones and strutting down a mini runway. He does the same with a box of sewing supplies, then a metal ruler. Jung laughs and nods.
Myneni agrees that Colm opened her eyes to the power of styling. “I’ve done two shows with this [graduate] collection before, student-run showcases. And it’s always just been the garments,” she says. “I’ve never really thought of adding on more pieces or switching it up. Now I’m like, OK, I can accessorise it with 10 other things and still maintain the true essence of the garments and the collection.” Dillane pushes her further on this when discussing how the pieces will be paired for the show, suggesting different combos so the individual garments don’t get lost in each other.
For Johnson, one of the biggest learnings has been how to create a collection that is cohesive, and that the progression of the looks builds a story — even without the full background. “Colm was really imperative about making the execution bring that story to someone who might not know what the context is,” she says.
Dillane toyed with the idea of showing some of his own collection, but in the end decided to keep focus on the designers. On Sunday, Johnson, Baptiste, Anthony, Jung and Myneni’s collections – and the stories they weaved through them – took centre stage. It was a taste of what Brooklyn’s next gen has to offer New York fashion.
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