This stop-motion show was monumental for the brand, and I think it represents KidSuper in its truest form. I had done two fashion shows prior to this one, which were off-calendar shows. I had gotten rejected from the official Paris Fashion Week menswear calendar both times, and this is the first show where I got accepted.
Those first two shows… I was very new to doing this, and I spent all of my money on them and they were very difficult to do—not that they have gotten easier since—but they were such crazy undertakings. I didn’t even know where to get models, so I had my mom and dad walk the first one, and the second was hilarious because models kept slipping because I created an accidental slip-and-slide with paint and plastic on the runway.
For this show, I just didn’t have the money or resources to do a third one. I was such an outsider, and I didn’t know if it was working or not. Then COVID came, and we were all scrambling. The men’s Paris Fashion Week was the first calendar of shows to go up after the pandemic hit, so we were the first to do whatever this new version of fashion shows was. That’s when I thought, okay, this is no longer a budget competition, it’s an ideas competition. You can’t rent a palace in Paris or fly out a Kardashian or have a Hadid walk. I thought that if we were competing on ideas, I had a fair shot and that this might be my moment to shine.
I have done stop-motion music videos and commercials for KidSuper. What I love about stop-motion is taking intangible objects and giving them life. That’s what the ethos of KidSuper is, if you think about it, bringing life and color and joy to the mundane. I remember talking to my friends and Florent [Belda, publicist] and being like, if we do this as a stop-motion doll show, will we get kicked off Paris Fashion Week because it’s not [traditional] clothes? But we ended up doing it. I ripped off the heads of Barbie dolls and 3D-printed all my heroes to turn them into guests, because everybody cares about who attends the shows, especially when you’re starting out. At that time I couldn’t get anyone, but I made Salvador Dalí, Jay Z, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Stephen Hawking. I even had an Anna Wintour doll.
