Kiko Kostadinov must be menswear’s most inventive young pattern cutter. He’s certainly one of the most capable.
He showed his spring collection this morning at a venue on Rue Férou, the famous Paris street that once housed the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Man Ray and has the words of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” emblazoned on one of its walls. But the place he approached this collection from was far less artistic and more scientific.
“I’m growing into a certain age,” said Kostadinov backstage, “I’m not old; I’m 34, but I think of people who are obsessed with their health, and also the people around me who got me thinking about different institutions,” he said of the hospital, clinics, and laboratories that occupied his mind. “You forget how related we all are to these places,” he said, continuing to explain that he considered the different roles in these spaces: doctors, researchers, caretakers, patients. Yet this wasn’t a conversation about mortality but rather about longevity: “I listened to this podcast that talked about how you can now live until 90, but that you don’t know how your final years may be,” said the ever reflective designer. “It’s health span, not lifespan. You have to do a lot work way in advance when you’re in your 30s or 40s if you want to have some enjoyable last few years.”
Kostadinov seems to be taking this same approach at setting up his brand for the future. “Last season was about building Kiko signatures, so now I wanted to expand them,” he said. Such was the case with the clever diagonal snap-dart construction of his opening jacket and trousers, which came from another outerwear piece from his spring 2018 collection, or of his “K” exposed darting applied to the front of double cap-sleeve T-shirts and on the shoulders of jackets. So ingenious is Kostadinov that even his equivalent to a logo is subtle and primarily technical, even if his deft pattern work is mostly decorative rather than functional.
If the designer was at any point literal with the results of his clinical and scientific probe, it would have been in the graphics of sci-fi looking liposomes scattered over two looks. “It’s a new way of consuming drugs, and it’s something so new but I think it will be present in the next 10 or 20 years,” he said. There were also scrubs and lab-coat-looking styles he scattered through the lineup and styled with puffy surgical caps. Except that the caps were down gilets folded into themselves and around the head, and the clinical cleanliness of these looks was intervened with colorful stripes (Kostadinov does not get enough credit for his meticulous color work).
Such is the charm of Kostadinov. What has made him a prominent if often quiet voice in menswear today is not just his technical skill but his subtlety. His clothes appear unfussy and unchallenging at face value, despite the amount of thought that has gone into them. That’s likely why the group of reporters listening intently to this season’s elucidation reacted in awe backstage when he calmly declared that this collection was finished in two weeks after the scrapping of his last experiment.
