Why oversize is back in fashion – and who is following the old streetwear label.
Karl Kani really is everywhere. Not just in Berlin, but also everywhere else I was able to look during the summer holidays: in Konstanz, Nuremberg, Winterthur, Rostock and the smaller towns around it. It seems as if the streetwear brand currently has the largest market share among cool teens and GenZs. And as if the 1990s were back again – for how many times now? Have the brand’s old fans, Tupac Shakur and Aaliyah, wherever they may be, sent thousands of young oversize revenants onto the streets? To be honest, I assumed that Karl Kani no longer belonged to the founder and that some mid-price fashion conglomerate must have swallowed up the brand.
Wrong: Costa Rica-born designer Carl Williams, who founded Karl Kani in New York in 1989, is still the owner. In the 1990s, the “Godfather of Urban Streetwear” made $100 million in sales with his fashion, which casually mixes high fashion quotes with B-boy silhouettes. After that, things went downhill, similar to other African-American brands like FUBU and Cross Colors. Skinny jeans were just the new thing. Not least thanks to pop stars like Ariana Grande and Migos, who then wore Karl Kani again, there is a renaissance.
Is Kanye West’s Kani brand?
For those unsure how Kani is pronounced: like “Can I”. The founder says in interviews that at the beginning he always asked himself whether he could make it to the top as a black designer, “Can I do it?” He then left out the question mark, in the sense of an affirmation: Yes, I can. In the Peek & Cloppenburg and Zalando web shops it is said that Williams also asked himself: “Can I become the Karl Lagerfeld of the streets?” Karl Kani, who has also adopted this name, only speaks in interviews about being Ralph Lauren was a role model. Is it possible that the Lagerfeld addition is so obvious because one of the Kani logos – two intertwined Ks – is somewhat reminiscent of the KL logo of the Lagerfeld brand?
Either way, there is a German connection: Karl Kani has been having a large part of the sales, and some of the design and production, done by the Cologne streetwear retail chain Snipes for a while now. It operates 700 stores worldwide, which means that a certain level of market saturation is ensured. But not that many people seem to know about the African-American-German joint venture. Why else is one of the most popular searches related to the brand on Google: Is the brand Kani by Kanye West?
This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 10/2023.