Small dog, big influence.
Every designer needs a muse, and Kiko Kostadinov’s happens to have an alarming obsession with tennis balls. His name’s Dante, a Lakeland Terrier that loves bananas whose mysterious Insta-story cameos never fail to make us smile — and immediately send the post to our partners. Between his duties of napping on the studio sofa, keeping morale high, and inspecting bags (an occupational hazard), Dante’s loving companionship was previously immortalized as a postage-stamp print, but now graduates from motif to muse, inspiring an entire collection in his honor.
It’s Kostadinov’s most British collection yet, which is ironic, considering nobody in the studio is actually from there. But that’s exactly where Dante comes in; the quintessentially English dog became their passport into a fantasy of Britishness. He lets them cosplay the countryside fantasy: the tweeds, the rugby tops, the aristocratic oddness, and then warp it to a Kiko Kostadinov-coded collection.
Puffed trousers, heraldic crests, and kneepads become a loving parody to the classic uniforms of Lakeland Terrier handlers — those fox-hunting gentlemen in tartans and high socks — now reimagined into a joyfully twisted countryside fantasy. Rugby tops and riding suits are pulled apart, reassembled, and puffed into unexpected silhouettes. Menswear and womenswear finally merge — because dogs don’t care about gendered clothing, and countryside expeditions in search of tennis balls care even less. There’s an absolute joy in this collection that collides the practical with the refined.
The menswear takes its cues from traditional country wardrobe staples, playing with a sense of easy formality and nodding to outdoor tailoring. Dog-walker uniforms come in heavyweight Japanese jersey, while a parka-and-trouser set in lightweight washed cotton features packable hoods, adjustable internal gaiters, and leather dog-bone belt loops and fastening toggles.
As Donna Haraway once wrote, humans and dogs live in an “unending dance” of mutual becoming — and this is that, but in wardrobe form. Dante shapes the designers as much as they shape him. He makes them go outside, touch some wet grass, and reconsider what ‘practical’ means when you’re knee-deep in mud but still committed to looking funky.
The DANTE Collection will be exclusively available on their webshop, on Thursday, 13th of November and in their Los Angeles, and Tokyo flagships on Saturday, 15th of November.
