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the Viral Moment That Launched AKINGS
and Knowing When to Pivot
TALKS
By: Charlie Kolbrener
Image by Jeff Samurai
The stacked jeans were actually created by accident, King recalls with a chuckle as he delves into the story of their design. “I wasn't the best sketcher,” he begins. “And I drew some slightly slanted pants. A friend’s mom was giving me some feedback on the tech packets that I was making for factories, and she told me, ‘They’re going to think this is a curved pant.’ I just thought it’d be really funny to submit a tech packet to a factory as a curved pant, and asked them to make it that way. So in a way, it started a little bit as a joke and an accident. And then when I got them back, I saw that they were able to stack and create this gathering.”
King is quick to note the importance of stacked pants, especially in the era: “Kanye was a really big stacked jeans kind of person, and he was just wearing really long APC waxed pants, 34-inch inseam denim, for the gathering of the material. You can wear a really long inseam, but if you're taller, it just tends to fall weirdly. And if you're shorter, it tends to fall really weirdly.”
So the fated arrival of the curved pants provided a perfect solution: jeans that stack well on everyone. While other luxury brands at the time had released unorthodox cuts to achieve stacking, they were far more experimental than King’s concoction. “I think they really pushed the limits of what's possible in that sense,” King says. “For me, we just made it slightly curved so that it has some stacking and gathering from knee down, but there was no intention to make it extreme.”
Looking back, King recalls, “It just felt very unique and something that just caught traction by accident with me taking a photo of it and it going viral. And now,” he laughs, “I have this product.”
Fashion is more than an art form; it’s a business. Many labels manage to find success by merging these two elements into a brand that presents the founder’s vision while keeping a close eye on the movement of the overall industry. Alan King, founder of the brand AKINGS, is a great example of such a phenomenon.
Birthed out of a nascent desire to make new pieces for his personal wardrobe, King has managed to grow his eponymous brand over the years in part due to his keen business acumen and eye for the development of the fashion landscape. We hung out on a recent afternoon in New York and got to hear a bit about how he got his start, the evolving world of fashion and some advice for anyone pursuing what they love.
The Stacked Pants
The pants are a centerpiece for the brand, but only one element of his wide range of clothing: “For AKINGS, I feel like it’s been an evolution. I started being more sure about what I wanted to design, what I wanted to create in a cohesive way. It still feels like I'm figuring it out every day. But in terms of a clear direction of, ‘Hey, here's a collection of pants in this cohesive style,’ that was really where I felt like the brand started.”
ALAN KING
“I would really like to build the next
generation of brands.”
ALAN KING
“You always have to find the next pivots, right?
If this isn't working, you find the next pivot.”
King turns more broadly to some advice for any entrepreneur: “You always have to find the next pivots, right? If this isn't working, you find the next pivot,” he says. “I think for fashion brands specifically, it’s even more important. Because you have the trend, this is going to happen. I think I got very lucky in a time period like 2015-2021 with the stacked jeans. It was all the craze and we got the recognition because we were in the game. As we started recognizing other emerging trends—like baggy pants—it’s a time to change or pivot. When you’re starting a brand, you have to be really hands on, knowing, like, Hey, this is the trend, this is the customer, this is where we’re pivoting to right away, really fast.”
Sometimes as an entrepreneur, you have to prioritize what you’re seeing in the culture over your personal preference, King explains. “It’s not always a hundred percent this is your vision of exactly what you like in design. I’ve had many moments where the thing that I release that I like, the next season over is when people start buying, and I’m like, ‘Man, I released this almost a year early.’”
From early on, this expertise led King to begin AKINGS Group, which gives him an opportunity to provide fledgling brands with advice and infrastructure to help launch their labels. In the early days of his personal brand, King didn’t want to work a traditional 9-5 and realized he could bring his experience to others. “I would really like to build the next generation of brands,” he tells me, adding: “I think AKINGS is very early, we’re still growing. But how I ended up working with some creator or influencer friends of mine is, I thought, ‘We can build their brands.’ We have the infrastructure, we have the teams where we have the manufacturers for it. We should just help them build their brands and they can learn from all of my mistakes and everything else that I've done. So it just started to click and make a lot more sense.’”
The stacking and slim silhouette is only one aspect of the AKINGS design aesthetic, as King explains. “I’m thinking of, what are the features beyond the fact that my jeans were curved that got me popular? And part of it was the paneling and the stitching and some of the pockets—different features that I incorporated into my early designs and people really liked. I have one cargo, it's an 11-pocket cargo and then they have double pockets and there's hidden compartments. It was one of the first early skinny cargo pants, and I think if I can do some sort of variation of that, but with this new fit that people are liking more now, that’s where I see the brand evolving. Like, Hey, we still stick true to being very detail oriented and we have this approach to how we do panels and how we execute pockets already.”
King and I spent a good chunk of time discussing the evolving menswear landscape and its current direction towards wider silhouettes, which eventually snowballs into a larger conversation on the importance of paying attention to trends. “I think a part of me was just very stubborn, and I was like, ‘Hey, I'm just going to do stacked skinny jeans and keep it in this way.’ I do think we will always have skinny jeans—it will always have its own niche, but I definitely am trying to challenge myself to make a new silhouette.”
The Importance
of the Pivot
“I’m most excited right now to grow my content,” King tells me. Literally as we speak, he has two video editors shooting their own content from the interview—part of a revived interest in documenting his experience as a brand founder.
“I experienced—not exactly a burnout, but moreso like, I've been doing this for a while and I had some great viral moments and great experiences, but I also almost stopped making content at the same pace,” says King, explaining his renewed interest in producing content for the brand. “Now I'm really doubling down and trying to build up.”
“For running a brand, my favorite thing, especially now, is knowing that I'm documenting it constantly. I think I spent so much time on it before, but I feel like I always kind of hid a lot of the features and things behind it because I felt like it didn’t need to be shown,” King continues. “There's a new age of brands being built now that will have all of that on video and photos versus before, we just had some black and white images of the showroom. But now we're having brands being built real time on YouTube, on Twitter, TikTok, Twitch, so on. And now I think that it's really exciting to see that I'm going to have all of this to be a part of the story.”
The Future
The designer’s keen eye for what’s next coupled with his unique approach to pants have landed him in the wardrobes of celebrities from Lil Baby to Tyga and Keshi. With numerous substantial accomplishments already in the rearview, King is eager to embark on a new chapter for his brand—and himself.
alan king
King—now 26 years old and living in Manhattan—and the brand found its niche in 2015 after a pair of his now signature pants went viral on Reddit. “Before then, I think I was just figuring it out. There was some local traction just among friends of friends and stuff. I think the internet jumpstarted [the brand]. With Reddit and it going viral, that year just became the founding year of the brand.”
photos by Kenneth Dapaah
photo by Ziwang Wang
photos by KENJI CHONG
Growing up in NYC’s Chinatown, King’s desire to create interesting garments began to rely on external factors as well. “For me, making clothing started with the idea that I wanted to make things for other people, and I wanted other people to wear it—outside of myself,” he says of the first pieces he started making more formally. “I started doing brand experimentation, printing t shirts, making mock ups really early on. And then I started doing denim and cut-and-sewn as a challenge my senior year of high school.”
“I got into clothing growing up, when I was 13 or 14,” King tells me. “It was kind of the first time that I think—entering high school—I saw that clothing was a status symbol and that your personal image started to matter a little bit more.”
This revelation led him to pursue designing for himself in the following years: “As I started developing a sense of style, I felt like there were certain things that were missing that I wanted to do. Maybe I wanted to tailor my pants a certain way, or change the fit of my hoodies. That was kind of my first reason for getting into clothing.”
early days
photo by Ziwang Wang
photo by Jeff Samurai
photos by Ziwang Wang