Welcome to a new episode of A Day in the Life of Kiko Kostadinov. Except that this show isn’t exactly about the designer’s day, and this collection was not presented in the style of the YouTube and TikTok vlogs named like so—or the Vogue video franchise, for that matter. Still, it was about a day in a life.
Inspired by the slower pace he experienced during his recent honeymoon, Kostadinov crafted this season around the idea of a man’s day on an island. Each look corresponded to an hour starting from 5:50 a.m. through 1:11 a.m. the following day, and the lighting of the show shifted ever so slightly to reflect the changing position of the sun—Kostadinov has to be the most romantic of cerebral designers.
One could presume that this was Kostadinov’s most straightforward collection of late, how else to embrace the idea of true daywear? In fact, backstage after the show when a reporter posed: “Normal clothes?” Kostadinov responded with “Are they? Maybe. I think so.”
“It was more of a character,” the designer explained, underscoring ideas of ease and wardrobing, of going from morning to night. He also said he built the collection sequentially, starting with a pair of pajamas for the beginning of the day that featured Bulgarian military motifs, through black suits for the evening. The key element, Kostadinov said, was the material development: Light twills, stonewashed Japanese denim, over-dyed jersey, brushed flannels, over-stitched leather, and a narrow woven kasuri cotton he turned into a handbag and placed between two diagonal zippered slashes on the front of a jacket. All together they crafted an effective portrait of a well lived-in wardrobe.
While Kostadinov’s fabrics, which are touch-to-believe good, are a detail you can’t accurately appreciate in these images, it’s his technical ingenuity that remains the most consistently special thing about him. He gathered and smocked sleeve caps and transformed actual sleeves into petals held together with snaps. There were jacket collars draped into cowl necks and lots more zippered slashing. Even with collections like this one, in which the idea is to embrace a semblance of simplicity, Kostadinov makes normal things look fun to wear. This is why he’s such a well-regarded designer among his peers: controlled chaos is generational parlance. It looks complicated but wears quite easily. Things are complex, but they can be simple—as simple as a funny meme or an internet take. The question that remains—what does a day in the life of Kiko look like?
