You have probably seen the paintings before you knew the name. The hand-painted faces, kissing couples, and surreal little scenes stretched across puffer jackets and knits have been worn by everyone from Jim Jones to Bad Bunny. The vibrant designs are all courtesy of Colm Dillane’s KidSuper. What started as a cafeteria side hustle in New York City has grown into a streetwear brand with multiple Paris runway shows under its belt, and evena Louis Vuitton collection, without its founder ever working a day inside the traditional fashion system. Here are 10 things to know about KidSuper.
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KidSuper started by selling T-shirts in a Brooklyn high school cafeteria.
Long before Paris, founder Colm Dillane was a student at Brooklyn Technical High School screen-printing graphic tees and selling them to classmates. He has said the whole thing began as a reaction to the Supreme era, when everyone around him was buying clothes from two of the biggest streetwear brands in the world. He figured he could just make his own. Dillane even made his own bootleg Bape t-shirts. The earliest version of the operation even ran under a different name, Brick Oven T-Shirts, before KidSuper existed as a brand.
The name was his dream rapper alias.
"KidSuper" was the rap name a teenage Dillane wanted for himself. He carried the moniker over to the clothing when he needed something to put on a hat, a tee, and a long-sleeve, and the label grew out of that. The name doubles as a mission statement he still repeats: the idea that a kid can decide he is capable of anything and simply outwork everyone else.
He studied math, not fashion, and played college soccer.
Dillane never went to design school. After Brooklyn Tech, he enrolled at New York University, earned a degree in mathematics, and played midfielder for the men's soccer team. He has often framed that outsider background as an advantage, arguing that because he came from soccer and numbers rather than fashion circles, he had to build the entire KidSuper world himself to get anyone in the industry to pay attention. Soccer has stayed central to the brand's identity. KidSuper has since designed jerseys and sponsored teams. This past June, he even hosted one of his most ambitious fashion shows yet at Nu Stadium in Miami, a 48-look collection that represented the 48 countries in the 2026 World Cup.
The brand runs out of a baby blue building in Brooklyn.
After NYU threatened to boot him for running a shop out of his spray-painted dorm room, Dillane moved everything to a run-down building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and painted it baby blue. That headquarters became KidSuper Studios, a live-work creative compound with a sewing room, a photo studio, a music studio, and even a turf-covered backyard for soccer. The New York Times once compared the whole setup to a modern version of Andy Warhol's Factory, and the space has functioned as much as an art collective as a clothing company.
In February 2024, Dillane upgraded the KidSuper HQ to KidSuper World, a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn home to a retail space, art gallery, design and screen-printing studios, and a rooftop soccer field. The exterior is still baby blue.
Russ recorded a platinum album in the KidSuper basement.
Music has been baked into KidSuper from the start, and the clearest proof lives in the basement. Russ recorded a large chunk of his platinum major-label debut, There's Really a Wolf, in a studio built into the KidSuper original Brooklyn HQ, earning Dillane a platinum plaque of his own for his role on the project. The building has hosted a long list of artists over the years, from Quavo to Joey Badass to Kehlani, and Dillane has doubled as a producer, director, and musician alongside his design work.
He co-designed a Louis Vuitton collection after Virgil Abloh.
The biggest moment that pushed KidSuper into the global fashion conversation came in January 2023, when Louis Vuitton tapped Dillane to help design its Fall/Winter 2023 men's collection. It was the first Vuitton men's show after Virgil Abloh's death, and Dillane had been quietly embedded inside the house's menswear studio for months. While some assumed that this would lead to a recurring role for Dillane as the new creative director of LV Men’s, it was ultimately a one-off show.
Puma has been his most consistent collaborator.
The KidSuper x PUMA partnership kicked off in 2020 with a soccer-inspired collection blending PUMA's football heritage with Dillane's own passion for the world's game. Dillane reimagined classic PUMA silhouettes like the Rider, Nitefox, Cell Dome Sock, Oslo City, and Wilo with hand-drawn scribbles, embroidery, and a retro, multicolored palette.
Since that first drop, the collaboration has become one of KidSuper's most enduring partnerships, expanding into signature football boots like the KING SUPER FG, a limited comedy-and-animation launch event at Harlem's Apollo Theater, and even custom kits for major football clubs like Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund, and Palmeiras for the FIFA Club World Cup. The pairing continues to lean into Dillane's lifelong love of the sport, merging streetwear sensibilities with PUMA's football legacy season after season.
KidSuper won an LVMH Prize.
Before Louis Vuitton, the fashion establishment had already flagged Dillane as an emerging designer to watch. KidSuper was a finalist at the prestigious LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers and shared the 2021 Karl Lagerfeld Prize, the award's high-profile special honor. He also received a 2022 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund nod.
Paris Fashion Week rejected him before it let him in.
KidSuper’s shows have become a fixture of the Paris Fashion Week Men’s calendar, but the road was not smooth. Dillane applied to show at Paris Fashion Week and was turned down multiple times before finally being accepted in 2019. He has admitted he almost submitted the application as a joke because breaking in felt impossible.
His runway shows are closer to theater than fashion.
A KidSuper show is rarely just models walking a straight line. Dillane's breakout Paris presentation used claymation to "feature" figures like Salvador Dalí, Naomi Campbell, and Pelé. He has staged his collection as a stand-up comedy night hosted by Tyra Banks, and partnered with Cirque du Soleil for a String Theory concept that turned the runway into a meditation on who really pulls the strings in our lives. It all traces back to a scrappier moment: in 2017, Dillane and his friends drove an RV cross-country to ComplexCon, making and selling shirts along the way. The showmanship has been there from the beginning.
