(Two intrepid people did in fact take the red-eye straight from one opening to the other: PR maven Gia Kuan, who works with both brands, and Ashland Mines, a.k.a. DJ Total Freedom, who is friends with Kostadinov and Clemens. Said Kuan, after catching up on a bit of sleep, “It was amazing to see this kind of IRL store energy back—the real fans were out!”)
Founded just shy of 20 years ago, Telfar is a boundary-breaking love letter to Clemens’s native New York, a line of graphic staples that twists luxury codes into accessible status symbols. (See: the subversive Telfar Tote.) Aesthetically speaking, Kostadinov’s work is very different. The Bulgarian-born Central Saint Martins grad founded his brand in 2017, introducing a singular lexicon of futuristic workwear that can’t be found anywhere else. But the two brands do have several things in common, including a family-style creative structure and, interestingly, a collaborative relationship with Trecartin, who designed the original set for Telfar TV— the brand’s 24/7 public access livestream platform—in 2021.
“Whenever people are like, the big fashion houses are so established that there’s no way to emerge as one now, I’m always like, no, that’s not true,” Trecartin said when reached by phone on Tuesday. “Telfar and Kiko are definitely going to be as big as these fashion houses someday. Those are literally the two I think about. And it’s not just because I know them.”
For now, both designers occupy a smaller but critical position in the megabrand era. As I wrote in a column about San Francisco menswear shaman Evan Kinori, cult designers are the crucial batteries that keep energy flowing through the rest of the system. The industry needs independent visionaries who take risks, who push creativity forward with new ideas that spread through their devoted audience.
I’m not sure if it’s exactly right to characterize Telfar and Kiko Kostadinov as cultish, given that they have as much clout and business acumen as any big global designer working today. Both command hard-core fans and thriving subcultures—Kostadinov told me that he’s heard of at least one marriage between Kiko-heads who met through their love of the brand. Yet his scene looks increasingly mainstream. If you’ve bought a pair of cool Asics sneakers recently, there’s a solid chance Kostadinov designed them through his unbranded IYKYK partnership with the Japanese sportswear giant, which also includes a line of fashion-y sportswear called Asics Novalis and collaborations with the likes of Heaven by Marc Jacobs and Brain Dead. Earlier this year, Levi’s dropped a line of intricately tailored denim pieces that first debuted on Kostadinov’s Paris Fashion Week runway. (They immediately sold out.)
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