Bobby Kim has spent his entire career showing up in rooms where nobody expected him. In his Substack, Kim writes, “My entire life, I’ve been sitting at the wrong table, dressing the wrong way, and breaking expectations of what I should or shouldn’t be.” Law-school student turned streetwear pioneer. Blogger before blogging was a business. A guy who built The Hundreds into a cultural institution and then, when everyone assumed he would stay in that lane forever, walked through the doors at Disney.
Now, in one of those serendipitous moments that only makes sense in hindsight, Kim is bridging all of those worlds at once, designing the new Disney x BLACKPINK collection, available exclusively on Complex Shop.
Kim’s relationship with Complex stretches back to the very beginning. One of his earliest memories is a Pharrell cover issue, from October/November 2005, that featured an A-to-Z guide of what was happening in culture. The letter H was dedicated to The Hundreds, marking the brand’s first major feature at that scale.
“We had gotten press, but not on that level,” Kim says.
The thread connecting Kim to Complex’s present runs directly through Aaron Levant, CEO of Complex. Around 2003, Levant was running a trade show called The Agenda Show in Los Angeles and invited Kim and his co-founder Ben Shenassafar to exhibit. They showed up with wrinkled samples in a cardboard box. No hangers, no rack, no steamer, no line sheets. There were 25 brands in that room, most far more polished. Two decades later, The Hundreds is the only one still standing.
Levant’s trajectory from Agenda to running Complex and ComplexCon tracks the same instinct he showed back then: finding what’s next and giving it a physical space to exist.
“He gave emerging brands a space to exist and to find each other in the physical form,” Kim says. “It’s just something he’s always done. Find what’s next, cultivate it, incubate it, and bring it above ground.”
The Disney x BLACKPINK collection is a thesis statement for everything Kim believes about creativity. On paper, the combination reads as unlikely: Disney’s 100-year legacy, BLACKPINK’s massive global pop presence, and design language rooted in punk fashion. But Kim sees the connective tissue clearly. Both Disney and K-pop are built on subversion and storytelling. Collaborations have always been where his best ideas come from.
“Collaborations are the origins of creativity,” Kim says. “It’s literally about ideas colliding and new ideas spawning from them.”
It’s the same energy that led him to co-found Family Style Food Festival in 2019, blending food, fashion, and streetwear into a single experience. Complex acquired the festival in 2024, bringing Kim’s vision under the same roof yet again and further cementing the decades-long relationship between him and Complex.
Kim designed the BLACKPINK collection nearly a year ago, shortly after joining Disney, and describes it as his learning the fundamentals. The hero piece centers on the standing Mickey Mouse silhouette, the most iconic Disney pose.
“I have to know the rules before I can bend the rules, or rewrite rules here,” Kim says. “So let’s start really simply, classically, give the consumer what they think that they want from Disney, but what is the BLACKPINK twist on it? Honoring their palette, which is black and pink, that’s really important to them from a merchandising point of view, and then also delivering a subtle nod to this rebellion that I’ve channeled from growing up within the punk culture. That’s very close to me.”
His goal was something that feels immediately wearable and familiar as Disney, but that a BLACKPINK fan would instantly recognize as theirs, even without seeing the word “BLACKPINK” on it.
“I just want it to be a heritage piece,” Kim says. “That everyone’s just like, that’s exactly what I wanted.”
When Kim made the move to Disney, the reaction was predictable: You’re a streetwear guy. Why corporate? But he pushes back on the premise. The perception of Disney as a faceless corporation doesn’t reflect what he’s experienced from the inside.
“Disney is the last monoculture,” Kim says. “There are thousands of characters, so many different franchises, so much IP, so many universes where everyone can find a place and feel represented. But it’s also the last shared space where it doesn’t feel tribal, and you’re not excluded from the conversation.”
There’s a personal dimension to this project that goes beyond design. Kim grew up in Southern California as a Korean American kid listening to rap and hardcore. But every summer trip to Korea introduced him to something that felt revelatory: the early seeds of K-pop. Artists like Seo Taiji and Boys and H.O.T., laid the groundwork for a cultural wave that wouldn’t fully arrive for another generation.
“I would hang out in the music shops, and they would sell this burgeoning K-pop, K-rap, whatever it was at the time,” Kim recalls. “And I just thought it was so cool. Like, oh, my Koreans are cool.”
He laughs at how obvious that sounds today, in the era of Squid Game, K-dramas, and Korean beauty dominating globally. But it wasn’t always like that, and the pride runs deep.
The Disney x BLACKPINK collection represents more than a single product drop. It signals Disney’s intent to stay on the cultural pulse and drive trends by partnering with brands like Complex.
For Kim, it brings everything full circle. From showing up to Levant’s trade show with wrinkled tees in a cardboard box, to designing a collection that sits at the intersection of the world’s biggest entertainment company and one of the world’s biggest pop groups, launching on the platform where it all started.
The wrong table, as always, turned out to be exactly the right one.
The Disney x BLACKPINK collection is available now exclusively on Complex Shop.
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