Yes He Kan: Karl Kani

Words Lily Mercer

The one you like is, “I need a dude with an attitude, only eat his fingers with his food. Karl Kani saggin’, Timbos draggin’, frontin’ in his ride with his homeboys braggin’.” I’ve got so many good ones but mine would probably have to be Biggie on ‘One More Chance’ - he goes, “I got the funk flow to make your drawers drop slow. So recognise the dick size in these Karl Kani jeans. I wear thirteens, know what I mean?” I thought that was really cool, iconic and that was one of the first artists to mention my name in a song. MC Lyte was first but Biggie was different ’cause he was from Brooklyn, from my old neighbourhood and he mentions my name in his song. It was so real and authentic ’cause we were the only ones making sizes for bigger guys back then, so he was really rapping about his lifestyle.

There’s a few, one big iconic one for me has to be Aaliyah when she did ‘One In A Million’, the promo for her album cover. We customised a leather jacket for her and she wore it in the promo and for one of her videos as well, then we did an iconic photo shoot with Aaliyah in New York by the Brooklyn Bridge. She was just a special person and the one thing about my relationships with a lot of the artists back then, they all happened organically. It wasn’t like a plan, it just happened. People say how did you do this, or that? It just happened. The brand was legit, the artists were real, the artists wanted to rock a legit brand and we needed legit artists too. It was a perfect marriage for all of us, the nineties was such a legit era of fashion. We were all so young and innocent trying to figure it out, so the energy just propelled all of us together which I think was really special.

I think the difference between now and back then is that there’s so many artists now. So it’s really hard to pick the ones out of so much music and entertainment out there, so much talent. Back then there weren’t that many artists, you could name the top artists on one hand, who were really popping like that. Now to be special you gotta be really, really special to stand out. So I think it’s harder now because back then, without so much competition you could stand out more. Now you gotta really out-do everybody to stand out, and you’ve gotta be sorta different, sorta cool. So good luck to the new artists out there for sure.

With social media, everything is just insane gratification today. You post something you want gratification right now, there’s no time to be patient and really develop things the way we did back in the day. People ask me sometimes, do you prefer things now or back in the day? And honestly I rather the way things were back in the days because people had to communicate, you had to engage. You didn’t have text messages or Instagram to create your message and your story, you had to engage with people so I think with engagement, it brings more reality and realness to certain things. I think with social media people are hidden behind the phone and technology which separates us from engaging, so I like the way things were obviously. I think one day we’ll get back to the real surface of where things were and bring streetwear back to where it needs to be for sure.

I think it’s two things, it’s more about the era, the culture and the vibe. No other culture, no other time period is gonna replace the nineties ’cause it was so fresh and

we were all trying to figure it out. I think when you have young minds trying to figure things out, that’s when the best things are developed. And that year of fashions, we took things that were available to us at the time and made them our own, that’s what was so special about it. When the nineties came in, because people were breakdancing and doing hip hop dancing, we couldn’t wear tight clothes doing those things; so the clothing had to fit the music culture. If music wasn’t breakdancing and baggy, maybe the clothing wouldn’t have went to that vibe. The clothing fit the culture where we were going and I think that just stands out completely. That’s why certain things are just timeless, that nineties culture and those nineties artists are just timeless. Another reason they’re timeless is because before them there were none. If you think about the artists that came out, Biggie, Tupac, Aaliyah, Jay Z, Puff Daddy you know, they won’t be replaced. They were the beginning of a movement and once you have the beginning of a movement, you can’t replace that. So nineties culture forever for sure…

Honestly I give so much props to where I grew up at. We grew up in the inner city projects, Brooklyn, New York and we just grew up; we had no fear for nothing. You couldn’t tell me I couldn’t make clothes and put my name on it, that was the last thing on my mind. Like, “No this is going to work, we’re doing this.” Failure wasn’t even a part of our thought pattern, from 12 years old we were hustling, selling newspapers, circulators, whatever we could just to get money just so we could buy clothing. We had such a competitive thing in our neighbourhood about fashion that you had to be fresh to be cool, you couldn’t pull any girls, you couldn’t hang out in the spots if you weren’t fresh so everybody’s game plan was to get fresh. That just builds the mentality, we got; go out there and get this. When I started to make my own clothing, there was one day in the park… I was making custom made clothing for myself, and then my friends used to say, “Oh that’s cool, where did you get it from?” Me and my friends were stingy with our ideas, so say one of my friends got something really cool, he would never tell me where he got it from because he didn’t want me to have it. I thought about making my own custom clothing, ’cause if I make it, none of them’s gonna have it ’cause I made it myself. After I made the outfits, guys would be like, “Oh that’s cool, where did you get it from?” So I never told them where my tailor was, that was making it. I said, if you want one, I’ll make you one. My friends would give me money to make them the same outfit that I had and I would make it for them. One day we was sitting in the park and I was bragging to these girls saying, “Hey I made that outfit for that guy Joe right there.” They didn’t believe me, so they tell him to come over. He comes over and she says, “Who made your outfit?” He says “Karl made it, what’s up?” She says “Can I see that jacket? And he takes off his jacket, he shows it to her and she says “Well if Karl made it, how come his name ain’t on it then?” That’s when it hit me, I wasn’t thinking about branding, I wasn’t thinking about putting my name into clothing, I was just making some clothes just trying to be cool. When she said that statement, she was being a smart Alec, but she was so right, because if I didn’t put my name on that clothing, anyone could say they made that clothing. That’s when the idea of Karl Kani started, when she said that statement. I went home and started thinking of a name for my brand and that’s what materialised into streetwear.

I kinda went where the culture was going, at the time a lot of Jamaican clubs were really hot and a lot of kids were going to Jamaican clubs. Jamaicans like to wear two-piece fashion outfits, linen outfits with the pants and shirts matching. That was the vibe, so we kinda went with that, then when hip hop music started becoming more popular in the streets, my thought pattern was to become more streetwear. If you follow the vibe of music, you can follow the vibe of fashion ’cause music dictates fashion all the time. You can never go against music and be on top of fashion, it just won’t happen. There, I just gave everyone the secret formula.

I think my whole family’s pretty fashionable. You know I have a picture of my mom and myself coming from Costa Rica to America for the first time, my mom had me in some orange dress shoes and a sky blue suit and some royal blue tie. I was like, “Mom, what were you thinking with this outfit?” She gets us on a plane, we’re dressed like we’re going to church, on the plane and she’s all decked out herself. Fashion was just so real, I grew up with that in my house. My dad always used to get his clothes made by a tailor which showed me, wow - I didn’t know you could make clothes that easy. My dad would go buy fabric, bring it to this other guy and tell the guy what he wants and he gets it made. My father didn’t know how to sew, he didn’t know how to make a pattern, he just had ideas.

I kept playing this song over and over, it’s called ’In The Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins. I used to play that song over and over and think of what I’m gonna call this brand. So every time I would go home, I would be in the dark and I’d have this pen. I used to write on this piece of paper, Karl, Karl, Karl, Karl - Karl Williams was my family’s given name - and I used to write Karl Williams Jeans. It just didn’t have a ring to it and every night this thing used to bother me, I used to get a pain in my chest, just thinking, thinking. One day I wrote ‘Can I’ on a piece of paper - Can I - I was actually talking to myself saying “Can I?” So I had it there and I left it there, I came home that night and kept writing ‘Can I’ over and over again, just playing around, not knowing where I’m going with this yet, right? So the next morning I wake up, one piece of paper had Karl written all over it, the other paper had Can I written all over it, so I started talking to myself, Karl Can I, can you do this? Can you make this happen? Can you follow your dreams and believe in yourself and make your goals achievable? I didn’t know the answer to it but I knew if I called myself.. if I kept that name as part of my name, everyday I’d have to answer that question, yes I can. That’s how the name came about, Karl Can I, I just changed the C to a K. That same signature that I was writing is how I developed the signature, I kept doing it on a piece of paper and it happened.

At first it was very difficult for us, I’ll be honest with you. We were like 22 years old and the brand was hotter than a pistol, everyone was buying it. Then all these companies started copying my stuff, making phoney Karl Kani stuff, selling it for really cheap, selling it at the gas stations, flea markets, it was driving us nuts. Then what happened was, various retailers started saying, “Oh we can’t sell your product because the fake stuff is cheaper, people are not buying it.” I felt like the story was coming to an end at this moment and we had to figure out what to do, so at the time we were doing the embroidered signature on most of the clothing. I had to think, I said “Wow, ok for them to get an embroidery machine is pretty simple so I’m making life easy for them ’cause anybody can get an embroidery machine.” So I thought about what I can do to get the bootleggers off my back, so we decide to come up with a metal plate and a leather patch and put the Kani logo into a metal plate and put registered trademark, then attach the metal plate to a leather patch and sew the leather patch onto the garment. I said, “If they’re gonna go through all this hassle man, these guys are too on me!” So we did that and low and behold, the bootleggers gave up, they said “Oh this is too much.” They tried to do it but it was too expensive for them to make all these pieces with the leather plate on it so they gave up and moved onto another brand. I think once you’re patient and think through things, there’s always an answer. The key is don’t get too caught up in the moment which we almost did. Luckily we thought different and decided to come up with something new to throw them off.

That’s a very interesting question and I’ve got a good story for that - so basically the Karl Kani brand we started here in 1989 in Brooklyn, New York and we came to California to set up shop. We had a very, very successful business throughout the 1990’s in the US and at a certain point the competition in the USA market started to get very fierce. There was a lot of brands doing the same similar looks that I was doing so we knew we had to expand and luckily found one of the best partners in Europe, which is the company Snipes. My partner Sven with Snipes, we linked up together and it was through the power of hip hop that really connected us together. He had a great love for hip hop culture, understood my brand, both companies had a track record of being true to the streets. We decided to get together and become partners in Europe and for him to distribute and manufacture my brand out there in such a great way to expand it to 25 foreign countries. To think that an idea that a kid had from the streets of New York, the same kid that was asking the question “Can I?” - I was the only one to dress my friends at the time, then to dress the hip hop market, now to become a household name in Europe. There’s something to be said about that and you know that leads me to another thought. It’s important to me, the power of thought and sometimes the greatest gifts in life are free. When I think about that, I think about the fact that I was able to think clearly at a young age. I had no fear, failure was not an option. Those words meant nothing to us, we were just going to get anything we want. You couldn’t tell me that I couldn’t make my own clothing, like no. All these things started with an idea and a thought. I tell people, imagine if only the rich could think, imagine you had to pay to use your brain. Do you know how many things are created from a thought? And thoughts are free, you don’t get charged to use your brain on a daily basis. When I talk to kids from the inner city, I tell them how much power they have. Because if you could deal with the lifestyle that kids are going through in the inner city and make

it out of that and still be able to smile, then you’re way stronger than a lot of people who’ve done a lot of other things in life. You’ve got to use those things and apply it to business or apply it to your goals and you should be ok. That’s the message we like to spread to people, the power of energy and manifestation as well.

Right? Imagine how many more people would wanna use it if they were like, ‘damn there’s no money in my bank so I can’t think anymore now’? And now, ‘if only I could just think for free’, but you have it - you gotta use it.

I would tell you this, most of those brands from the nineties that were sold, my so-called competitors or whatever, most of those brands don’t exist anymore or the original owners don’t own it anymore. You know Karl Kani is owned 100% by me and my family, I think it’s very important. For one thing, we have the title of being the godfather of streetwear, the originator of streetwear right? So just imagine if the original brand of streetwear was not around anymore? Then the story could be told however which way, of how streetwear started - anyone could say they started it, there’s no facts to back it up, the person that started it is not here anymore. Ownership has always been important to me, I know for sure why I was put on this earth, what my goals, what my destiny was because I didn’t go to school for fashion, I have no background in fashion. There’s no other brand - this is a fact - there’s no other brand that can ever say “We started streetwear before Karl Kani,” ‘cause it’s not factual. I tell people all the time, if there was a brand that would say that, tell them to raise their hand and I have one question to ask to prove you wrong. I would say, “If you started streetwear, it should have been pretty big because you started a whole movement that didn’t exist right?” Then I would say “Cool, show me all the iconic people that wore your brand, if you started streetwear, such a big movement, line ‘em up.” If you can line ‘em up, I’ll never say anything again in my whole life. That won’t happen because it didn’t happen - there’s no one else that can show you Biggie, Tupac, Aaliyah, Nas, Dr. Dre, Snoop, Rihanna, I could just keep naming, no one else can do that. None of those ads were paid endorsements, those are just real people wearing a real brand, real things at a real moment of all of our lives, so that’s my take on streetwear originality.

Yeah, then you’re just talking, and people do that. It wasn’t like my goal to be the originator of streetwear, I was just going where God took me and following the signs and doing everything I needed to do to stay on point and let the goals take me where they need to go. That’s why we’re here today.

You know when I started and we got our big first orders with this company called Marygoround, we had a three million dollar order. Ever since then, I’ve been kinda numb mentally in terms of goals. I just knew that now the game is on, you can’t stop. Because everything that you wanted, on those days you didn’t have what you wanted, those days when you were hurting because you saw someone have a car you didn’t have, those feelings and emotions that you experienced back then, those feelings aren’t here anymore. So which feeling do you like more, do you like this feeling? Or the feeling of not having? Once you understand what you don’t want anymore, you know what you need to do. If you don’t do what you need to do and you get that feeling again, don’t question anymore ’cause you should have done what you needed to do when you had the moment, so there’s no excuses.

You know I always go ahead of the game and keep pushing to another limit and keep finding a new challenge to keep going. I realise now it’s more of a mental game, ’cause now you’re playing with yourself, so you have these opportunities, now it’s how much can you continue to drive yourself? So at one point my thing was working out and getting hard in the gym, you always have to have a challenge to keep your mind going ’cause your mind can start to get stagnant if you’re not using it. And you can never feel like you’ve made it. Mentally I never think, ‘I’ve made it’, or ‘I’m on top of the world’. I think when you start thinking about that, you need to start retiring soon ’cause there’s always gonna be a young buck that’s coming up the way that wants your spot so you’ve always gotta be that hungry guy mentally that keeps the machine going. That’s just the model we live by where we come from. We input what we went through in our youth, into business and it works well.

You know the only benefit that I see back then, is because information wasn’t so readily available to you, you weren’t sidetracked by what other people were doing. Because you didn’t know what they were doing, there was no way for you to find out what they were doing, we didn’t have any cell phones for christ sake,

you know what I mean? There’s no way kids in Brooklyn knew what kids in California were doing and kids in California knew what kids in Chicago were doing, unless you had a cousin that lived out there that you went to visit for the Summer. That’s the only way you’d know, and come back to the hood with stories about “Oh kids in Chicago are wearing their sneakers like this.” I think with less information, you can have better tunnel vision, if that makes sense. Because when so much information is available to you, it can kinda not be a good thing too because now you don’t know where to go with your thoughts. With less information you can focus on what you want and sort of lock certain things in and that’s what we did back then.

The best thing that ever could’ve happened to me is God created California and I’ll tell you why - because growing up in Brooklyn, you know everybody, right? Every day you go out there’s always some of the homies, this, that and the third and you kinda get caught up in the mix. When we came to California, we knew no one out here, all we did was have a store, in South Central on Crenshaw Blvd, right down the street from where Nipsey Hussle had his store. We just had each other so every day we was only focused on one thing which was Karl Kani. Every day, every night, 21, 22, 23 years old, that’s all we did - there was nothing else for us to do! My homeboy used to go out to the clubs but my whole thing was focusing on our journey. I think coming to California, separated me from the pack and that meant everything but Brooklyn gave me the hard content, the hustler mentality, everything you needed to survive out here, Brooklyn taught us to have tough skin, never bend, never fold. Those things were important so I think the combo of the two… In California it never rains, the weather is great, you’re surrounded by success all the time so you have to be motivated to be part of this. I think it was a good balance for us to come to California.

100%, you have that saying: Queens get the money, Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn takes it. So Brooklyn’s always number one, all the time. We was always ahead of the game for sure, there’s a certain mentality that comes out of Brooklyn; Jay Z and Biggie - do I need to say more?

Yeah I think Fairfax definitely has a great streetwear movement there, I think the Supreme store was there, they had Crooks & Castles there for a moment. They do have nice retail stores, I like the way they market and stay true to the customer. There’s something to be said about each store having their own retail outlets where they can be in touch and in tune with the US consumer. We thought about that, right now we have 10 stores in Japan which are doing very well for us so we’re thinking about expanding to having a flagship in the US once this COVID-19 thing is over. I think it’s important to be out there with the customer for sure.

Yeah we go once a quarter, we haven’t been out there since the second quarter of last year. I love Tokyo, they’re always ahead of the game in fashion, it’s a different style of fashion that we have out there with the brand because they know the customer and they love logos and a certain fit. I think each market is a little bit different but I love the Japanese market, it’s trendsetting so we have to keep up with them which is really cool.

I love London! First of all the city itself, I love going there. I used to visit my boy Umar from over at PrettyLittleThing, he’s one of the owners there. We did a collaboration with them, he took me around London. The fashion’s always cool, the women there dress impeccably to me, such class, very, very classy. Understated class is what I would say, very classic and very simple. Definitely very different to Japan, Japan is very loud and bold, I feel London is very understated, sexy, simplicity, which is not easy to do. You know some of the hardest things to do are something basic and simple and clean, it’s always easy to do something gaudy to stand out - to be simple and to be cool and stand out is not easy, so big ups to London and the fashion style out there for sure.

Well the collaboration we did with them was very interesting because we took two different worlds and combined them together, who would’ve ever thought? PrettyLittleThing is a very fast fashion, girly, middle of the road brand and you got Karl Kani, the original streetwear brand bringing hip hop, true streetwear culture together. We didn’t know how successful it would be but it was very, very successful, I think both companies were able to achieve what we wanted. PrettyLittleThing wanted to get more of an iconic street edge which we’re very well established with, Karl Kani, what we were looking

to do was expand the brand expansion to a customer base - especially dipping into women’s. As a company, we’re known for menswear, the PrettyLittleThing line was sexy, it was cool. We got girls who was into hip hop, who may have seen the logo, seen the signature and didn’t know what it was and then PrettyLittleThing was able to put it all together into a package base. I think we both were able to achieve what we wanted, it was a

great collaboration and helped us to continue to grow the brand in a European market.

Keep in mind, back then women were wearing men’s clothing, think about how Aaliyah used to dress, she started that whole thing! She’d be wearing a men’s jacket, men’s pants, men’s hat but then a sexy women’s top underneath that. She established sexy and street together, that’s why her style is impeccable. There’ll never ever be anyone else like her again, that trend she started that! The baggy pants and the bathing suit top, that was Aaliyah, no one else before her did that, that was her trend, that’s nineties fashion. That’s why I say the nineties fashion will never go out of fashion, it will never go anywhere because before that style of fashion nothing existed ever.

We have one of the best teams ever, our European team is based in Germany with Mark Jensen heading up the sales and we have Anna heading the design team and Khalid. We have such a great team and we work in such a great unit together. This collection is amazing, we spread information to each other, we see what trends are happening and we see how to put the Karl Kani brand in the middle of the trend and continue to set trends. We want to separate the women’s brand to make it a really sexy streetwear women’s brand, different to the men’s brand but we do have some pieces that we want to crossover in unisex. Our colours are very muted, earth tone colours for the new season coming up. The quality is impeccable, we’re looking to do some great collaborations in the future with a few brands that we’re talking to right now. The future looks good, we’re going to continue to grow and continue to spread the message and continue to inspire people which I think is important. We tell people, sometimes in life you’ve got to ask yourself the question “Can I?” And every day you’ve got to answer the question “Yes we can, yes we all can.” That’s been our motto to inspire the world, we’ve been doing a good job of that and we wanna continue to spread that message throughout the rest of our career.

Yeah it’s funny, I was thinking about that. I was thinking - sometimes I ask myself questions like I’m interviewing myself like, “How did you feel after your first ten years?” And I would say if you can make it through the first ten years, and you still feel like going, you may be onto something. The first ten years has the roughest moments to deal with and you gotta be ready for it. Your mental and your physical works hand in hand; you gotta be mentally prepared and physically prepared. Business is warfare and you gotta be ready for it, I think once you establish those things you gon’ be alright. Nothing in this world is given to you, you gotta go out there and take it, if that’s what you want. So that’s our model and what we like to preach for sure.

I gotta say the first decade. The second decade to me was very trying mentally, that was rough to be honest. The first one was the best and I wish I could go back to ’89 and go through it again.

It was fun, I can remember things so vividly as if it happened yesterday but I realise you’ve got to embrace each moment in life because every moment is real and meaningful. I love what I do and this is what I’m here for. You’ve got to accept your journey and once you accept your purpose, you’ll be ok. Don’t go against your purpose. Your purpose is knocking on your door, you just need to answer it.

We’re gonna have a three day party, non-stop. I heard they used to have these parties non-stop in Berlin…

I think so, you go in on a Friday and people leave out on a Sunday?

I’ve never been but I think COVID has pushed me to the point, I’m all in. Take me to the three day club, I’m doing a three day fashion show. Let’s go, let’s get it! We gonna take this thing on the road, get some Hennessy, make this thing pop off! Who’s coming?