Colm Doherty’s playful fashion house takes over a luxury car brand’s anniversary show, proving that the boundary between automotive heritage and runway chaos is basically gone.
Colm Doherty’s KidSuper has spent the last half-decade building a cult following by treating fashion like a prank you’re lucky to be in on. His pieces read like coded jokes to friends, his runway shows happen in warehouses and unexpected venues, and everything carries that specific energy of someone who finds the entire fashion establishment mildly absurd. So of course, his next move is to do a capsule collection for Mercedes-Benz’s 140th anniversary show in Miami, which is either the most corporate sellout or the most perfectly trolling flex a designer of his temperament could pull off.
The timing matters. KidSuper’s previous work exists almost entirely within fashion’s orbit, presented to fashion insiders and the streetwear obsessives who treat the brand like a password to something cooler. Pivoting to a legacy automotive brand for a collaborative capsule is the kind of move that normally signals a designer’s transition into the mainstream. But Doherty’s practice has never relied on taking himself seriously, and Mercedes clearly gets that. The Miami show becomes less about legitimizing KidSuper within luxury’s old guard and more about KidSuper infiltrating it on his own terms, bringing his particular brand of irreverent playfulness to a company that’s been making cars since the 1880s.
What makes this genuinely interesting is that neither party is pretending this is about some deep philosophical alignment between fashion and engineering. It’s a collision. A 140-year-old German industrial giant and a New York designer known for subversive humor and deliberately anti-establishment energy are sharing a runway in Miami because the rules around what those things can do together have quietly dissolved. The capsule itself will likely be where Doherty’s sensibility gets tested against the gravity of heritage branding. Mercedes can’t afford to be too strange. KidSuper can’t afford to be too safe. That tension is where the actual story lives.
