As fashion becomes increasingly fluent in AI, Colm Dillane is taking KidSuper in the opposite direction. With hand-built sets, practical effects and his signature childlike imagination, the designer is proving that making the impossible still feels more exciting when it’s real.
Colm Dillane seems to have already realized that we’re getting tired of AI-generated campaigns. With KidSuper Studios, the New York-based designer has always built a universe that goes far beyond clothes, blending fashion, painting, cinema and performance. His latest campaign takes this approach even further, bringing back practical effects and old-school filmmaking tricks to create surreal images without relying on generative AI.
It feels like part of a broader desire for something real. After years of increasingly polished and artificial imagery, knowing that something was actually built, shot and made is becoming part of its appeal. On Instagram, the brand deliberately reveals the tricks behind the campaign, showing how the impossible can still be made possible through ingenuity and by literally thinking outside the box, something that, in the age of AI, is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine.
It’s no coincidence that Dillane keeps turning to cinema. For FW26’s Outside the Box, he wrote and directed a short film starring Vincent Cassel, building the entire show around the line between reality, fiction and automation.
How Colm Dillane Turned His Dream Into Reality
Born in New York, Colm Dillane spent much of his childhood moving around the world, from Chicago to Mexico City, then to a small town in Wisconsin, before eventually returning to New York. During his first years of high school, he once found himself spray-painting the white T-shirt he was wearing. The moment he now suspects might have been where it all began.
Soon, some of his friends joined in, and together they created BOTS, short for Brick Oven T-Shirts, producing their first shirts printed with their own designs. But the project didn’t exactly have a happy ending: most of their customers were friends, disagreements within the group grew, and as high school came to an end, so did BOTS.
The first T-shirt Dillane created and released entirely on his own was dedicated to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, featuring a caricature of Nelson Mandela and a pattern inspired by the South African flag. He ordered 72 of them and sold just 13. The disappointment taught him an important lesson: making good products wasn’t enough. He needed a brand, a message and something people could connect with.
That realization eventually led to KidSuper. Ironically, the name wasn’t originally meant for a fashion brand at all. Dillane was writing lyrics at the time and considering becoming a rapper. While brainstorming possible stage names with his friend Demir Purisic, “Super Kid” became “Kid Super” and finally “KidSuper.” They immediately realized it sounded less like a rap name and more like the name of a T-shirt company. It stuck.
After spending six months in Brazil trying to pursue professional football, Dillane returned to New York and eventually started university. KidSuper began to take shape during his early college years, and with around $3,000 borrowed from his parents, he was able to produce one of the brand’s first proper collections.
By his third year of university, Dillane decided to rent a storefront in Brooklyn, a space he would also live in. He rebuilt it piece by piece, transforming a run-down space into the physical home of KidSuper. Its opening came together through endless hours of frantic work alongside the close friends who had supported the project from the beginning. There was a barbecue in the backyard serving sausages, a DJ whose technical problems caused more chaos than anything else, and an impromptu skatepark that emerged in the basement while everyone waited for the next performer to arrive.
In many ways, KidSuper still carries the same energy that filled the store that day. At the heart of the brand is the reassuring, almost childlike belief that anything is possible, perhaps because, for Dillane, so much of it actually has been.
Colm Dillane Is Still Making the Impossible
Now, in 2026, KidSuper has grown far beyond the T-shirt brand it once was. Dillane continues to use KidSuper Studios as a space to produce collections, paintings, photography, films, campaigns and elaborate sets. His latest campaign is a perfect example: its upside-down room was physically constructed inside the studio, a place where, quite literally, almost anything seems possible.
This September, Dillane also brought the second edition of The People’s Runway to Brooklyn during New York Fashion Week, giving five emerging designers mentorship, funding and the opportunity to present their work on the runway. There is something particularly fitting about that evolution: the kid who once relied on his friends to help him build a website, print T-shirts and open his first store is now creating the infrastructure for a new generation of creatives to do something similar and potentially turn their own ideas into reality.
Seen through this trajectory, KidSuper’s decision to step away from AI for its latest campaign feels less like an isolated marketing statement and more like a natural continuation of Dillane’s creative philosophy. Physically building an upside-down room to achieve an impossible image is, in many ways, driven by the same instinct that led him to spray-paint a T-shirt as a teenager: if you can imagine it, why not figure out how to actually make it?