Ksubi

Ksubi was founded in 2000 in Sydney by Dan Single, George Gorrow, Paul Wilson, and Gareth Moody as a denim-anchored Australian streetwear brand built specifically around what they described as 'a deliberately fucked-up, deliberately destroyed' denim aesthetic — heavily-distressed jeans, paint-spattered finishing, deliberately asymmetric construction. The brand became culturally famous through a 2001 fashion show that released 100 live rats onto the runway during the show, an event that brought the brand into the international press and the broader Australian-design conversation. The Ksubi vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: heavily-distressed and acid-washed denim (the brand's defining product category), the iconic Van Winkle and Chitch jean fits, the Ksubi cap and embroidered streetwear basics, the Black Diamond series of even-more-destroyed denim, and a colour palette anchored to washed-indigo, washed-black, ecru, and the brand's recurring use of acid-wash colour bursts. The brand has done long-running collaborations with Travis Scott (the Cactus Jack × Ksubi capsules have produced some of the brand's most-collected pieces), Justin Bieber, Lil Yachty, and various other hip-hop-and-streetwear celebrity adopters. The brand is owned by ICONIX Brand Group, the US fashion-rights holding company that acquired Ksubi in 2018. Ksubi operates flagship retail in Sydney (Paddington), Melbourne, Los Angeles (Fairfax Avenue), New York (Soho), Tokyo, plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, Selfridges, the major US specialty denim retailers, and a wide international streetwear-specialty distribution. The brand has been one of the defining Australian-anchored streetwear-meets-denim brands of the post-2000 generation.