Kiko Kostadinov

Kiko Kostadinov was founded in 2016 in London by Bulgarian-born designer Kiko Kostadinov, who graduated from Central Saint Martins that year. The brand's premise has been distinctive from the start: combine an architecturally trained pattern-cutting approach with engineering-aesthetic outerwear references and a colour palette borrowed from Bulgarian Cold War-era textiles. The Kiko Kostadinov vocabulary settled around several signatures: technical jackets with deliberately broken pattern-cutting (a sleeve that doesn't sit where it should sit), trousers cut with engineering precision, and the AFFIX sub-brand (a separate technical project Kostadinov runs with Stephen Mann). The brand's long-running ASICS Sportstyle partnership has produced some of the most-discussed sneaker collaborations of the past five years — the GEL-Sokat Infinity, the GEL-Kiril, the GEL-Burz. Camper x Kiko Kostadinov has been another major collaboration. The brand is independent and held by Kostadinov plus design directors Laura and Deanna Fanning (sisters who joined as womenswear designers in 2018). The London studio produces in Italy and Portugal. Few young designers have so quickly built a recognisable formal vocabulary while operating at relatively small commercial scale — and few have leveraged collaborations as effectively to amplify a quiet design proposition.