A few minutes before his spring 2027 mega-show, KidSuper’s Colm Dillane walked down the arrival tunnel of Miami’s gleaming new Nu Stadium (an arena that was financed, in part, by David Beckham and his soccer team, Inter Miami). Draped around the designer’s neck were collaborative cleats he’d made with Puma. So far at this ongoing World Cup, these shoes have been worn on the field by two huge stars: the United States’ Christian Pulisic and Brazil’s Neymar. “Everything for me right now is related to the World Cup,” Dillane, a lifelong soccer player and fan, said. “With tonight, being here, it was, like, how do we honor that?”
Those cleats were a hint at his answer: Dillane collaborated with more than 50 global partners, from a small-batch sewer in South Africa to McDonald’s. KidSuper has long established itself as a brand built on myriad visual assemblies with major online appeal, but in this one-time departure from Paris Fashion Week for South Florida, he ditched whatever politesse one might vaguely associate with showing in the French capital and threw everything at the dartboard in the Magic City. Brashly, it worked.
For one: For the first time in a long time, American consumerism is being celebrated, or at least spotlit, around the planet. Memes of World Cup-spectating international visitors discovering Buc-ees, to name just one example, have done numbers. Among Dillane’s collaborators were Mercedes-Benz, Bose, Perrier and, yes, Mickey D’s, which is perhaps the most obvious instance of American consumerism to have ever existed. He worked the automaker’s tristar logo into a briefcase, and he printed the golden arches onto a baseball cap. (In the lead-up to the World Cup, Dillane also linked with BAPE on 48 versions of the house’s famed Bapesta sneaker.)
There’s a financial incentive in aligning with large corporations that want to be part of a cool young entity, but from a macro point of view and with dollar-sign cynicism aside, the big branding worked as spring’s foundation and in KidSuper’s favor. Dillane couldn’t have necessarily known America’s culture of flagrant commercialization would become an object of global fascination, but the result felt in step with the moment. Things became more interesting, though, when looking at his plethora of indie-leaning arrangements. “There are so many,” Dillane said backstage as we surveyed his run-of-show.
He had 48 looks, each of which was influenced by a different country, and each of which was worn by a model from said nation. That being so, Dillane “didn’t want to name the countries specifically,” hoping that people would be able to “guess.” He gave away a few backstage, anyway: “This girl DM’d me from South Africa saying she makes these knit hats,” pointing to a beanie with extended trailing tassels. “I said, yes, we’d love to include them, they just have to be here, like, tomorrow. For Curaçao, there’s an artist who photographs sunsets, so we added that ombre here.” He gestured toward an oversized western shirt, piped in yellow and with flowers sewn over its gloaming-mimicking dye. “For Austria, we have a reinterpretation of an Egon Schiele painting on a jumper. His work just became public domain, and that’s my favorite artist. Turkey is kind of interesting: it’s a ‘balloon dress,’ inspired by the hot air balloons in Cappadocia.” That piece featured a circus tent-striped bustier with mock-inflatable add-ons bubbling around the waist. His rundown reflected the adage about the American melting pot, but the effect was more psychedelic—like when you’re a kid making sand art, then shaking it all together and catching glimpses of color in the purply leftover wash.
The binding thread, which was strengthened in part by Wisdom Kaye (who styled the show), was KidSuper’s signature polychrome hodgepodge; busy patchworks gave way to flowery and starry suede appliqués or knitted intarsias and flowy fabric paneling, and hues ran from the acid-boiled to denim blues and boardroom browns. Dillane takes the plentiful and steers it towards a kind of wild uniform; he makes his own sense of the broadness and constancy of perpetual motley imagery we’re seeing on our feeds, 24/7.
Yes, there were some outlier fits (some of the womenswear felt a little too bulky) and odder items (a tie sculpted as if blown in the wind was too gimmicky), but, just as the World Cup brings the masses together, it also served as a creative coagulant for the KidSuper crew: this was a lot, but, like the title of Sean Paul’s hit song “Like Glue,” which the singer performed at the show’s finale, Dillane stuck it all together.