KidSuper Fall 2023 Menswear Collection

The door was a total shitshow. The police were called. Then came the actual show. It lasted nearly an hour, after starting over an hour late (which admittedly wasn’t their fault). It was rude, crude, filthy and bad. The unsayable was said, over and over. There were fat jokes, cocaine jokes, gay jokes, Black jokes, women jokes, diversity jokes, French jokes, Italian jokes, Balenciaga jokes and many, most especially nasty KidSuper jokes. There were jokes about subjects I am reluctant even to name in this family fashion title of record, given the censoriously shallow nature of contemporary digital discourse. It was often extreme. It was often hilarious. The room loved it. The rafters were rocked. And it had never been done before.

As trailed, KidSuper threw his own version of a Netflix Special—featuring several comedians with real Netflix Specials—at the Casino de Paris tonight. The format was akin to that of a roasting, and the chief subjects of that roasting were the brand’s founder Colm Dillane and fashion itself—OK, and also French people. Although the show was not streamed—Dillane said he wanted to be able to edit for safety’s sake before releasing—pretty much everyone in the room was filming on their phones. Somebody is bound to take offense. Netflix should option it for real.

Ever since Lenny Bruce pioneered the form, modern comedians have combined freedom of speech and fierce humor to say the unsayable and rattle the establishment. We are only talking about the fashion establishment here, but Supe and his troupe pulled off that same counterculture trick tonight. The absolute star was Tyra Banks, who wore 10 of the 20 looks as compere, and hadn’t (as far as I know) graced a proper Paris catwalk since 1993 or so. Why has she been gone so long? She propositioned audience members, was fascinating about her time modeling in Paris and her reasons for leaving America then (clue: racial prejudice), and waxed especially lyrical about a pink illustrated trench with an empire-line belt that rendered her svelte even after packing on the pounds during covid.

Who else? The hour grows late, this show ran really late, and there are more pieces to file, but in brief, Jeff Ross was amongst the most deliciously filthy, and delivered the Balenciaga line that set the tone. Yvonne Orji speculated that as a Black female in a show full of white male comedians, she was the diversity hire (that was before she knew about Banks’s role). Stavros Halkias reveled in being easily the plus-est plus-sized model anywhere this menswear season (note to colleagues: anyone doing a body-positivity audit must include this brand) and said some truly inappropriate things about his enduring attachment to America’s Next Top Model. Tyra took it on the chin. FARY, who is French, was amongst the funniest—even if you many didn’t understand his material. The closing act, Andrew Schulz, worked a routine around Alexander Wang that was enough to give a publicist recurring nightmares.

The looks were arguably incidental, but of course were not. Kissing bags and jackets, embroidered suiting, Halkias’ tightly paneled tracksuit, illustrated shoes, and Francesca Amfitheatrof’s jewelry (that you could barely see) were all the crucial extras here in a show that will be remembered—just like the last KidSuper show—for being unlike any other. KidSuper is a joke. Get it?