Fashion Goals: Colm Dillane Reveals KidSuper’s Runway Move From Paris to Miami During the World Cup

“I am doing Paris Fashion Week,” insists Colm Dillane: “I’m just doing it from Miami.”

KidSuper shows are always different, but its upcoming spring 2027 show will be especially so. That’s because this season its founder Dillane will present his new collection at the Nu Stadium in Miami during the World Cup.

The show will kick off at the home ground of the David Beckham-founded Inter Miami CF on the evening (local time) of June 25. As ever, Dillane seems to be shooting for the stars: he says he’s planning for an audience of 2,500. But when you consider that the show falls between two particularly juicy World Cup fixtures in Miami—Scotland v Brazil on June 24, and Colombia v Portugal on June 27—it seems likely that there will be a healthy crowd of fans to come and spectate.

“This is kind of my way to prove to everyone that I’m the real soccer guy [in fashion],” he says. “Especially when all these brands are now hopping on the train.”

It’s true that Dillane has been playing soccer pretty much since he could kick a ball. “I grew up playing in New York City, and of the 25 kids that were on my team, 18 kids were from different countries,” he says. Before founding KidSuper he represented Brooklyn Technical High School and later NYU. One of the first things he decided on when developing the KidSuper HQ in Brooklyn was its rooftop soccer pitch, which hosts matches in the nascent KidSuper league. He cofounded another team, the Super Ninos, with J Balvin, and this season it was crowned Baller League USA champions. Past KidSuper soccer-related collabs have run from Pantofola d’Oro to Puma, while previous KidSuper shows have featured cameos from soccer legends including Brazil’s Ronaldinho and Italy’s Mario Balotelli. This World Cup, he says, KidSuper will also be on the pitch itself, via Puma boots made for US captain Christian Pulisic and Brazilian magician Neymar.

Dillane’s lifelong love of the beautiful game presented him with a powerful dilemma when he began preparing for this month’s menswear Paris Fashion Week, which coincides with the World Cup. He says: “Every time I kept coming up with the ideas for Paris, I kept getting pulled back to the US. Because this is the World Cup, and we might not see it here again for another 30 or 40 years.”

The concept for the show, he says, emerged from a new collaboration with BAPE in which he remixed the brand’s Bapesta shoe into a special edition of 48 colorways to represent each nation that will compete in the tournament. To shoot the collection, Dillane cast grandmothers from each of those countries, finding 37 of them in his home city. “New York is such a multicultural place,” he says. “I got to go all around the city and meet these grandmothers. And we found most of them through the guys I play with, from their families.” For Dillane, the process became a living map of the way soccer connects New York’s families, neighborhoods, and diasporic communities: a local illustration of soccer’s unique sporting status as a global lightning rod.

That insight became the seed of this season’s runway idea. The spring 2027 show will also be built around the 48 qualified nations, with each look loosely inspired by one country and developed in collaboration with an artist from that place. The casting, too, is being approached through the same lens, with models intended to represent each nation. “Meeting all of these cultures is so fun,” he says. “So I thought, what if I did a fashion show that kind of talked a little bit deeper about this?”

Dillane wants the show to feel closer to a mini World Cup than a conventional runway show. Alongside the runway inside the stadium, he’s planning for live bands, stadium music, performances, fireworks and, if Dillane takes up my suggestion, vuvuzelas too. “I’m trying to get it kind of chaotic,” he says. He is also planning to collaborate with fashion students from the nearby Istituto Marangoni Miami to help produce (and maybe even feature in) the show. For those who attend, there is talk of special KidSuper “bootleg merch” going on sale outside the stadium. And for those of us committed to watching Paris Fashion Week (and the World Cup) from Paris, the show will be live-streamed to a special venue there with a start time of 2am. (New Yorkers, meanwhile, may want to check out the watch parties he’s hosting at his Williamsburg headquarters for key games throughout the Cup.)

The upcoming KidSuper show promises to be the closest the World Cup has come to fashion since the epic Yves Saint Laurent pre-final runway tribute in 1998. The designer is also adamant that this Miami away day is a one-off. He characterizes this season’s show as “Paris Fashion Week remote,” and adds: “We will definitely be back next January.”