A couple of weeks ago, the 10-year-old North West did what most 10-year-olds do: she said something inappropriate in public. “Guys, there’s another brand coming up,” she giddily announced to thousands of viewers on a TikTok livestream, while her mother Kim Kardashian tried to backpedal. North could have been speaking about any number of projects that will one day be a part of the Kardashian Konglomerate, but she might also have been referring to Kylie Jenner’s latest brand, Khy.
Less than 24 hours after its launch, Kylie was named Brand Innovator at the Wall Street Journal’s 2023 Innovator Awards, which was also attended by Timothée Chalamet. “My fans want to wear the things that I’m wearing and I want to bring that to them,” Kylie said of her debut collection, a collaboration with the Berlin-based label Namilia. “I keep saying the word ‘accessible’.” And, as countless Instagram carousels will demonstrate, Kylie serves as her brand’s best advertisement. Her face fixed in a dissociative come hither, here is someone who has spent the past 12 months connecting her 398 million followers to fashion’s uppermost echelons.
To accept the award, Kylie didn’t dress in one of Khy’s vegan leather minidresses (or a vegan leather trench coat or vegan leather opera gloves or a vegan leather bomber jacket), but a dress from Ferragamo’s spring 2024 collection (Chalamet, for his part, wore a Dolce Gabbana suit). It was, at least, dark-colored with a high-shine breastplate and therefore looked a bit Khy-coded. Having dispatched from the front rows at Schiaparelli, Maison Margiela, and even Prada, the look sits well within Khy and Kylie’s broader role as a high-low lynchpin.