Kai Kühne is having a really great week. He kicked it off with his first real Valentine’s Day date. “I’m in love with the best man in the wooooorld,” fashion’s former “bad boy” said, cooing to me about his boyfriend, the photographer Johnny Misheff, when I pop by his studio for a visit.
The German’s warm and fuzzy feelings have translated to his fall collection, which shows today. “It looks beautiful. It gets to the core of what my design is about,” Kühne, a former member of Threeasfour, adds walking me past clothing racks filled with beautifully constructed jackets, trousers and dresses with the cleanest lines. He describes the work as an evolution from last season.
An inspiration sketch of Kühne’s fall collection.
“It’s for that strong city woman who is chic, but cool,” he explains. He sought inspiration from the period during World War I that gave birth to the Dada movement. “I saw this documentary covering all of the cool people at the time — Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, and so on,” he adds. It prompted him to explore what he describes as “the clash between black and white and how it creates gray.” Meanwhile, his attention to form and line was inspired by the 1970s architectural collective, Superstudio.
It sounds really heady and dense, but translates into seriously elegant and wearable work. “I’m the happiest man in the world and that colours my collection,” he says.
