Louis Vuitton men’s has got a new guest designer

Just like a major world city or Elon Musk’s Twitter staff, fashion never sleeps. Fresh off the heels of launching its campaign with legendary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, Louis Vuitton has announced that Colm Dillane, the founder and creative director of KidSuper, is set to collaborate with its men’s studio for the brand’s AW23 collection.

Although this will be the first guest designer to produce an LV menswear collection since the death of Virgil Abloh, the house has made it clear that Dillane will not be taking over the creative director mantle. Instead, the upcoming show will be created “with the participation of” the KidSuper founder on January 19 at Paris Fashion Week. The brand’s statement continued, asserting that, “in other words, Colm is embedded into the men’s studio.”

Known for its high concept patchworking, graffiti scrawled denim and eye-popping colour palette, KidSuper has become the brand du jour for many a fashion-forward star, outfitting the likes of Jack Harlow, Gucci Mane, French Montana and Migos.

LV’s burgeoning relationship with hip-hop’s superstars was fostered by Abloh when he took the helm in 2018, so it makes sense that the house would enlist a designer with a pre-existing connection to the community to continue Abloh’s legacy.

Dillane’s own brand has been a lifetime in the making, with the designer starting out selling his own designs on the streets of New York’s Soho as a teenager after a successful class project making printed t-shirts. Following stints in the 2010s as a maths major at NYU and a loft-dwelling Brooklynite creative, Dillane launched KidSuper in 2018.

Since then, the designer has gone from strength to strength, showing the brand’s SS23 collection at Paris Fashion Week. He was also nominated for CFDA’s American Emerging Designer of the Year at their 2022 awards ceremony.

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