Is Evan Kinori Menswear’s Favorite Cult Designer?

Like any good cult gathering, there was a uniform at JDJ on Friday night. “You should have a brown iPhone,” one editor told a Kinori fan who was decked out in the brand’s signature earthen tones. Kinori, who periodically flipped records on a vintage Braun turntable, has had a particularly big month. There’s the exhibition, the first pop-up retail project he’s done outside of his own store in SF. The furniture. The apple cider, which was as dry as a crisp French white. And there was his Met Gala debut courtesy of GQ bossman Will Welch, who fielded questions about his Kinori-designed bespoke sumi-ink velvet tuxedo all evening.

Kinori, of course, waved off any praise of his red carpet debut. “When Will came to me I was like, Are you sure you want me to do this? I’ve never worn a tux. I don’t know anything about it.”

Kinori might only have a few employees, but his name connotes an idea of a lifestyle that’s as clear as any brand. Hence the furniture. The slightly counterintuitive reality of Kinori’s position as the pied piper of locavore menswear is that he can take on ambitious projects that designers of brands ten times his size might not. As I discovered at Salone del Mobile, furniture is a tricky space for fashion brands, who face steep costs to develop furniture production and distribution, and a competitive market filled with more established design names. For a nimble operation like Kinori’s, though, furniture is simply an intuitive development of his practice.

“I’m making what I like or what I’m interested in, and I’m hoping that maybe somebody else will like it, too,” he said. His first offering, which includes a simple, Judd-like couch, coffee table, bookshelf, stool, and bedframe, is made-to-order north of his SF home base using sustainably salvaged native woods like elm, redwood, and cypress. The furniture, Kinori told me, is “Is the same language” as the clothes. “It’s material proportion, scale, form. It’s using the same tools in my toolbox, the same way of expressing ideas.”