admin There are two kinds of designers: those who dress in their own wares, and those who have a creative vision that is separate from their personal preferences. There are no wrong answers here, but thankfully for all Kith devotees, Ronnie Fieg is in the former camp. He works as his own fit model and with each passing year he has carefully molded the Kith aesthetic to fit his own: a man in his 40s, married and with children, with a discerning taste for fine materials among other things, honed over the years. His challenge as of late has been the push and pull of bringing the Kith collections along with this new phase in his life, without leaving behind the customers that helped him get to the top.
He’s more than met that challenge—witness the video campaign from last season, starring Adrien Brody wearing the label’s secretly sumptuous clothes while teetering beneath his ineffable Adrien Brody-ness as he cooks an Italian meal and runs lines for a role…in Italian—but he still feels the pressure. When we meet at the vast Kith offices in Williamsburg, it’s the first thing he mentions. “It’s been hard to continue to elevate, we have to push ourselves to always be better—even when it’s really good,” he shares. “And last fall was really, really good for us.” He needn’t worry, as he and his team are clearly riding a good wave. The first thing he shows me is a khaki lapel-less suit in a tech fabric—the jacket features a magnetic lock and reverses to black, and there are pants to match in both colors. “I have lapel-less suiting from Margiela that I really like, and that’s become kind of like my go-to where it’s casual enough to wear during the day and not take it too seriously,” he adds. It appears in both khaki and black in the look book, styled with a simple off-white cotton turtleneck, and a white button down shirt respectively. They both capture a different energy: sleek and elegant, with the ease of pajamas.
Ease is perhaps one of the reigning feelings at Kith that most reflects Fieg’s own attitude toward dressing. The shirts and jackets are classic silhouettes; button downs, hoodies, starter jackets, all made from incredibly luxe fabrics that are begging to be touched and examined; like a shirt in an embedded checkered pattern made from fraying some of the threads on the weave to create small squares (worn over an airy tonal wool sweater whose shade of gray brought to mind the graphite smudges of a hand rubbing against the pages of a pencil-scribbled notebook), or the multi-color striped cotton shirt that was as soft as a very old, beloved T-shirt (worn underneath an equally sumptuous beige suede jacket, though another version in patchworked shades of hunter green was truly one of the stars of the collection), or the short-sleeve leather shirt laser cut and embroidered with Kith’s signature paisley pattern, which is remixed and reworked every season. Trousers often feature an elastic waistband and a drawstring even when they are made of double cotton jerseys, or tonal paisley jacquards, but the look is rarely “dressed down.” He wants to make Kith known for its indulgence in materials, for its textures. “What I preach to the team is that we need to always have these pinnacle pieces that are so textural that it’s obviously us,” he explains. “Like you don’t need the branding, and you can tell that it’s us just by the look and feel of it.”
If this all seems very serious and capital-M Menswear Fashion, that’s because it is! But Fieg hasn’t lost his playful edge, take a hoodie printed with a photorealistic image of mountains with delicately embroidered flowers at the bottom; nor has he lost his love for boldly emblazoning the Kith logo throughout the collection, like on an oversize leather bomber jacket with batwing sleeves in contrasting blocks of red and black and a bold Kith logo across the back that seemed like an updated version of the classic 8-ball jacket, though okay, maybe it was also a nod to the original Air Jordan 11 colorway. (Fieg may have been named creative director of the New York Knicks in November, but childhood nostalgia for Jordan is forever.) “The spectrum that we cover needs to be a little wider than most brands because of the people that we cater to,” he explained. “I started off a certain way and as we’ve grown we’ve kept a lot of those customers, they’ve gotten older with me, but I don’t forget about the younger consumer either.”
