What is Kunai? What does the name and symbol mean?
I’m not a fan of the eponymous label for a couple reasons, one being that most of my work doesn’t have to do with me. It makes sense that kiko is self-titled, he really seems to be looking inward as opposed to out at the world. I tend to work on garments that have a voice unlike my own, often commandeering the voice of something else. The other main reason is that I don’t really see myself working on Kunai past the foreseeable future. It’s a project. I know myself well enough that I’ll never have a ‘final stage’ or anything like that. I plan on working parasitically though other companies as conduits for my work. Projects over labels.
What’s it like being a part of the underground New York design scene? Besides designing for your own brand , you’ve done a myriad of other creative work with other brands and designers. as someone who dropped out of fashion school how has hands on collaborative work guided the direction of Kunai?
It’s pretty great. Most of the good underground designers in the city know each other and hang out. All of us revolving around the garment district helps. Honestly I haven’t really done much collaborative work, and I intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. Kawakubo, when asked about why she hadn’t directly worked with Junya in the early years, said she wants 2+2 to = 5 for a collaboration to make sense. I really agree with this. I can’t imagine another designer that thinks/works in a way copesthetic to my process having anything meaningful to add to my work, and vice versa. Unless we’re able to transcend the relationship and bring out a third entity, the only advantage would be having audience crossover, and there are better ways to achieve that benefit anyways. I want to collaborate with brands that have strong historical connotations through their commerce alone, so that I can betray that history with a twisted celebration of it. Kind of in an anti-irony way. But even then, the answer isn’t in collaborating, it’s in doing work directly for them. Some stuff only makes sense if it’s truly “official”.
You seem to be very inspired by the outdoors , can you tell me more about your experiences with nature and how it influences your way of designing.
I wouldn’t say that I’m inspired by the outdoors, I’ve just been spending more time in it which has been sick.
Why did you go to Wallace Idaho to shoot this collection.
1: When I’m out there, I’m not so deeply involved in the tunnelvision simulacra of New York. There are things that were considered, decided on, and left. Physically and culturally. There isn’t a constantly evolving stream of bullshit being reified. It’s a place that the ever-long tendrils of start-up culture haven’t been to. These Lackings are amazing. When I’m in NY, I have to work to remember how much their presence affects my perspective and headspace.
2: I have internet friends who live there and are rigorous artists (amazing for my art practice)
3: Camo is a better alternative to black. I have never made a fully black garment, and I never will (Leather jacket exception obv.). I disagree with fashions obsession with using black as a wardrobe color: it contrasts too much, it gets dirty easily, it obscures shape//texture/detail/drape. Camo suffers from none of this. So to be able to go to a context where it makes sense, and I can use that context to offer it as a viable option, makes me happy.
Tell me about your choice to make athleisure the focus of this project.
All fashion is divorced from its inspo, to me it seems like athleisure is the most apparent severing of signifiers from core. The bootleg adidas project (of which this is the first true installment) is a process of using that formula and exaggerating it so far that it kind of returns to its base. I guess it’s a kind of horseshoe theory.
Should your garments be consumed at face value or is context, reference, and inspiration necessary to fully appreciate the product?
Honestly I can’t decide. I think they’re both valid ways of perceiving the work. I shot a lot of the editorial content in ways that pushes face value, trying to emulate what a giant company like Adidas would do. I shot a lot of editorial content that informs context. I’m pretty split between the two since, long term, I want to disguise all of this as being commerce, and have the consumers think they are participating in arbitrage, on the other hand, I don’t have the positioning to do that in the way it should be done. It’s a question I’m thinking a lot more about as I start to work on the next installment.
Why do you choose to not make collections but rather work whenever you feel passionate about a project?
Collections exist for an industry schedule, an industry that I exist within only as a non-citizen. Since I’m not looking to get stocked in stores (for the foreseeable future), I have no showroom presence, so I have nothing to gain from working within the temporal and workflow confines that showrooms require. So I just work on what I think I should work on, and release it in the way that’s truest to the work.
What would your ideal place within the fashion industry look like? Could you coexist with its expectations and treatment of designers?
I can definitely cooexist, but for the time being I don’t want to. I’m really enjoying my lifestyle right now and I’m not ready for the ladder-jump (as opposed to climb) that I need to make to do the kind of work I envision for myself down the line.
What is the biggest problem in the fashion industry right now and why?
I mean things are pretty fucked on multiple fronts.
-We got the impending climate disasters which the giant amount of clothing production is contributing to (and sustainability has been completely astroturfed to the point that it is meaningless and if anything contributes to the problem)
-we got extremely wack output from the higher echelons (except 2 or three designers),
-we got the positions like bliss foster who could’ve been valid/necessary voice/critics if they hadn’t all opted to become apparatus of the millennial pop designers who’ve taken over those higher echelons,
-we got the fashion/design programs filled with bougie kids (when tuition is that expensive of course you’re not going to see anything Real.) who want to make speculative fantasy work that’s always just a narcissistic ventriloquism of the work they look up to,
-we got fashion publications that are machines for advertising so far gone that everything about them is as defunct as the advertisers will let them become(which is pretty damn far).
It’s a lot of things. Obviously the climate is the most important, but that responsibility can’t fall on any group of individuals within fashion, this requires a shift in organizing principles at a very broad scale, a scale nobody I will ever meet will have the power to affect. In terms of a problem we can affect? Definitely we have to call out lesser work for what it is, the lowering of the bar has been shitty for everybody except the pop artists that contribute nothing to discourse but reap everything from its progression.
How has archive fashion and design influenced your work, tell me about your favorite designers you look up to.
If you haven’t tried on a 3k coat, you’re never gonna be able to make one. To be able to hold, wear, and understand other designers perspectives reminds you that there really are unlimited variables in a garment. Truly appreciating the fullness of vision that great artists have is so valuable.
As for my favorites:
Demna. Nobody else today comes close.
Im also a long-time fan of Final Home. It’s a perfectly conceptualized and executed brand.
There’s literally no fluff. There isn’t a single detail you could remove without affecting the language of the concept. I often strive for that kind of precision. This is much harder to do with more nuanced concepts, but the point still stands: the best work appears simple on its face then reveals its multi-sidedness after the fact. It tends to come from a fully fleshed out concept that’s then boiled down to a singularity, giving a feeling of simplicity (as opposed to starting with a small concept and increasing the complexity through details, ie, working upwards).
Wanting to finish with asking what your next creative project or what direction you plan to go in?
Kind of continuing from the last question: I want to make work that masquerades as being simpler than it really is. Art that pretends to be commerce.
This month I’ve released like 350 images of the first part of this. May will be an online refractory period for me, I’m looking for a dead horse badly beaten, and I think, conceptually, athleisure is the perfect target. So I’m considering continuing the athleisure note into the next project but in a different context. Maybe via starting a skate team for a month or so, since skate apparel is absolutely a dead horse, and probably one of the worst offending territory of commerce pretending to be art. Then again, the horseshoe theory graph has definitely been filled in. I’m not sure yet.