Did Vuitton find Virgil Abloh's successor in KidSuper?

A surprise collaboration is set to energize menswear shows in Paris as Colm Dillane, aka KidSuper, takes the creative reins of the brand.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">In the sequel to the adventures of local Brooklyn superhero KidSuper, Louis Vuitton announced on Tuesday that its menswear show next week will feature designs created in collaboration with the designer , which has been discreetly integrated into the Paris workshop for months.

The succession at Vuitton remains fashion's greatest mystery and best-kept secret. (Among the talents mooted for the job are Martine Rose, A-Cold-Wall's Samuel Ross and Grace Wales Bonner.) and conceptual void left by the death of Virgil Abloh in 2021, the news comes close to a mission statement of the House. and CEO, told Women's Wear Daily, referring not just to Mr Dillane, but to a group of talents gathered for a menswear show that will involve filmmakers Olivier and Michel Gondry - best known for their music videos for Daft Punk , the Foo Fighters and Björk — stylist Ibrahim Kamara and set designer Lina Kutsovskaya. A show appearance from "a world-renowned music star" is also expected.

If chemistry is key, so is Instagram, TikTok and the inescapable reality that as an industry relentlessly focuses on entertainment, designers need more in their kits than needle and thread. Mr. Dillane, as he is the first to say, can't sew.

Never mind. Particularly in the bigger houses, where accessories drive profits and designers are challenged to generate the cross-channel content essential to brand identity and desirability. This is especially true for what was once a seedy luggage maker and is now the cornerstone of the world's largest luxury goods house, where sales last year exceeded $22 billion, according to estimates. of banking giant HSBC.

While menswear is only part of Vuitton's profits, its halo effect on the image of the brand, which began when Mr. Abloh was appointed in 2018, cannot be overstated. And there's every reason to believe that Mr. Burke's motivation in choosing Mr. Dillane as guest track designer was to advance a brand narrative.

From Starting off, it was clear that as a designer, Mr. Dillane, 31, was a great storyteller. While still a math whiz at Brooklyn Tech, he started making and selling T-shirts in his school cafeteria. He presented one of his first collections in 2020 in the form of a stop motion film featuring modified Barbie dolls wearing miniature versions of his streetwear designs. Funding his own brand with profits from KidSuper cartoon hoodies and t-shirts, he went on to create other minimal productions featuring his parents, people from his cohort of friends, strangers filmed in the street and invited to share their dream ambitions, and, perhaps in particular, the Claymation figurines.

It was the latter that caught the attention of the judges of the prestigious LVMH Prize, which celebrates designers under 40; in 2021, he awarded him the second Karl Lagerfeld Prize along with two other designers. Like Mr. Abloh did, Mr. Dillane thrives on creative collaboration. (Among his unlikely business partners are Puma, Jagermeister, Modelo and SpaghettiOs.) Yet unlike Mr. Abloh, a relentless referent, who fulfilled curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud's long-held prophecy that, at the future, the D.J. would become the dominant figure in our culture — Mr. Dillane is less a mixmaster than an irrepressible generator of ideas.

Requested last year by Mr. Burke to present some creations for Vuitton, he instead produced a 500-page mission statement. "It was 5% products and 95% ideas and concepts," Dillane said over the phone. As a first-generation American, the child of a Spanish mother and an Irish father, he said, "I always felt this pressure to hurry up and make the most of every opportunity." p>

As for what the future holds beyond January 19, when his menswear show will premiere, he said, "I don't I have no idea."

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