By the time New York designer Kingsley Gbadegesin had launched his brand K.ngsley, which celebrates its fifth anniversary this summer, he had learned two important lessons. First: Always listen to your mother. Second: Never underestimate the power of the right look for the club. It was 2019 and Gbadegesin, who had worked in operations for the likes of Celine and Loewe before founding K.ngsley, was at the gym and on the phone with his mom, feeling a bit meh—you know, that ennui that can just come out of the blue and pass over you like a cloud suddenly scudding across the sun. “I was telling her how I was feeling, and she gave me some advice that she had never given me, which I remember to this day,” he recalled. “‘Kingsley,’ she told me, ‘You need to go out tonight.’”
A little later that day, he bumped into a friend who would be running the door at a party called FIST (‘Fun Is Still Transgressive’) who implored him: “Diva, you’ve got to come.” In the end, Gbadegesin had only 15 minutes to get ready, so he dug out a box-fresh Hanes white tank and a pair of scissors, and a few snips later, he had a body-hugging, body-contouring, and body-celebrating look to wear. He duly posted it on Instagram, showing only his tank-clad torso, and woke up the next morning to more likes than he’d ever had for any image. “And I was so upset,” Gbadegesin said, laughing, “because my face wasn’t even in the photo!”
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, all of this taught Gbadegesin a third vital lesson (and aspiring designers everywhere, take note): You can go pretty far with your own label when you begin with one brilliant hero product. The tank he created in 2020 off the back of the one he’d customized for himself was the perfect item at the perfect time: Instagrammable, all-gender-friendly, queer-positive, sex-positive, body-inclusive, and just downright cool. Oh, and relatively affordable, at $180. More than that, it was entirely authentic to who Gbadegesin is, and to his world.
That tank is still a bestseller, and in the time since launching it. he has seen his customer base go from about 90/10% men to women to around 75/25% women to men. “I’ve always done it for the girls,” he said of his clothing, “and for me, the girls are biological women, trans women, gays…but I definitely think there is this innate female energy to what I do, and I feel like [what I do] can be a safe space for them too.”
That one piece spawned annual collections—acts, he calls them—delivered twice a year that feel grounded in quotidian reality (shirting, denim, polo shirts, T-shirt dressing), but which have been cleverly and imaginatively elevated by slashing, paneling, juxtaposing, and contrasting—and all with a celebration of an individual’s body, gender, and sexuality, which have been complemented with other categories, from workwear boots to sunglasses and jewelry.
I first saw Gbadegesin’s work at a group runway show held on the Dumbo waterfront in Brooklyn one steamy Saturday evening the summer of 2022, and I was impressed: The clothing—sexily athletic—had a hint of the urban urgency of Helmut Lang (and as a Lang megafan, I do not make that comparison lightly). Then, an off-season, off-schedule show in a club in Bushwick last fall affirmed both what he had to say and what he is capable of. There were cotton poplin button-downs cut wide and scissored short over his androgynous jeans; boxer briefs turned into shorts; cotton shirtdresses with open, draped backs; and bias-banded dresses with some serious slink going on. And in that way in which you can always sense an up-and-coming designer is connecting, the audience, who came wearing his designs, looked as effortlessly terrific as the models who walked through the crowd.
“My work is as much about identity as it is about how it makes people feel,” Gbadegesin offered as explanation as to why his label connects with people: “how it makes identity more than an internal reflection; how it can make it more real. There is a certain feeling clothes give me. It’s very emotional—I can show you everything I am without saying a word. Clothes [to me] have always been like armor, a confidence boost for facing the outside world. That’s what I hope to bring forth and make possible for others through my work.”
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From the very beginning, Gbadegesin understood that community was important—his own, and that of the wider world that would adopt his clothes because their aesthetic and their attitude reflected who they are. Community remains everything to him, including his friend Conley Averett, of Judy Turner, who he turned to for advice in 2020 when the idea of launching his own label first popped up in his head: ‘Kingsley—if not now, when?’ Averett told him, before introducing him to a factory in LA who could make the two versions of the tanks he’d by then designed.
There were others. Amanda Murray, the über-chic British-born, NYC-based fashion consultant, was a crucial presence. She wore one of the tanks, and immediately brought Gbadegesin more than 1,500 new friend requests—many of them eager to get their hands on his clothing. As his label grew, designer friends would moonlight for him, coming together to create a label true to their vision of fashion and of the world. “There’s something about the spirit of four or five homosexuals when we’re gathered together: We’re unstoppable,” Gbadegesin said with a laugh.
His former LVMH colleague and friend Nesli Danisman saw him through the first six months of launching his label via daily therapeutic phone calls, after Lil Nas X and Issa Rae both wore his tanks to a huge and positive reaction. Though he did learn another hard-won lesson when he’d forgotten to switch on the SOLD OUT notifications and the orders kept flooding in. That wasn’t the only setback he overcame: He’d done a shoot to launch K.ngsley, only for the photographer to disappear before delivering the images. “I kind of panicked,” he says, “but then I just took a BTS image I had, slapped the brand logo on it, and said Coming Soon—and K.ngsley was born.”
It is a label born during two era-defining landmarks: the pandemic (which, despite the challenges, was a factor in opening up his mind to a different future) and the social justice movements, particularly Black Lives Matter, which brought into the open so many conversations that needed to happen—not least of all in the fashion industry. “The Black Lives Matter movement helped propel us with our wholesale, but we ourselves never used it,” he said. “Our early imagery was very sensual, it was just this liberty thing, and that worked for us—it gave us the visibility we might not have gotten otherwise—but I am so grateful to the business we created, because we sold out three times in the course of three months with some of our retailers,” Gbadegesin said. “After we could meet in person again—I am not going to lie—every single vendor of mine was, like, ‘Who the hell is K.ngsley?!” Because our sell-through was so good.”
For any young—Gbadegesin is 32—self-financed designer today, money is the root of everything. Having worked on both sides of the business, creative and commercial, Gbadegesin is equally savvy to opportunities and pitfalls. “The first thing I learned is that this is a business that takes a lot of resources, and I am so grateful for our early successes because they’ve allowed us to be investment-free, and to launch the building blocks of K.ngsley,” he said. “I saw that when I worked for Phoebe Philo [at Celine]: wardrobing and building that with your clients. I’ve had to learn how to make the cycle of fashion, which can be vicious, work for me,” he continued. “That’s how I came up with the idea of our collections as acts—this idea of growing the wardrobes of our customers as we go along.”
His tank program, he says, has been instrumental in carrying his business for two years while he was figuring out what K.ngsley can and should be. More recently, the specter of the Trump administration tariffs has meant more financial juggling. “This time round [after the last Trump presidency] has been brutal,” he said. “I’ve learned that you have to be nimble—and thankfully, we design our clothes so that they’re kind of seasonless. Tariffs are one thing, but we’re also seeing a shift in our customer spend too. So things are tight, but again, I’m just thankful that I get to do what I do with the people I get to do it with.”
It’s that spirit, a kind of optimistic realism—or realistic optimism—as much as his terrific clothing that makes K.ngsley a vital part of New York’s fashion landscape right now. “I love that we have a brand which is youthful and courageous and smart,” a brand that can do things that speak to its following, like his PrEP-inspired jewelry, which draws on that small blue pill. “In our community, Black and brown people still have, even in 2025, the highest infection rate,” he said. “Creating this jewelry, I was saying, ‘I want you to be yourself—I want you to be sexually liberated, but I also want you to be safe.’”
“The biggest thing I want to say about the last five years is that it has been a journey,” Gbadegesin noted. “I am not going to lie: Every collection, every launch, every activation, every delivery: It’s your 10 minutes of fame. And if that is the only thing you are attaching yourself to, I am sorry, you’re not in a great place. It’s fleeting. None of this is easy. It’s not easy, and it’s not glamorous. You truly have to love this. I’m 32, and sometimes I feel like I am 55!” And yet, he said, “fashion raised me, in a way. It taught me how to show up for myself, and there was a certain growth and consciousness that came with that.”
There have been other highlights: His friends who work with him, for one thing. “They reach out and help season after season, and I could cry, because I really love them.” As to what else glows in his mind: contributing to the Beyoncé world tour; dressing Blackpink; having a K.ngsley-clad Lupita Nyong’o on the cover of Elle; and, oh yeah, the not inconsequential point where his brand reached $1 million in revenue. (“That was a number I never thought I’d see,” Gbadegesin said.) As to what’s next: a fifth anniversary show later this year—maybe, hopefully, during NYFW in September. Gbadegesin would also love to take on the creative directorship of a brand. And in the gesture of a fifth birthday gift, let’s put that last wish out into the universe.