Fleece Season

The thing about Kylie Jenner designing clothes is that she’s actually good at it—or at least good at knowing what she and her audience want to wear, which in fashion amounts to the same thing. The adidas Originals collaboration she put out in late 2018 was called adidasCOEEZE, and the name tells you everything: the entire collection was fleece, available in a deep Santa-red or a muted purple, built explicitly around the idea of being warm and comfortable while still looking like you made a deliberate choice that morning.

It was streetwear for the couch, or the couch rendered as streetwear, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. I find myself more charitable than expected. There’s something honest about a collection that doesn’t pretend to be high fashion—that commits fully to softness and color saturation and the specific pleasure of being bundled up in something that cost more than it needed to. She paired it with two versions of the Falcon, the adidas dad shoe that was having its cultural moment in 2018: one in gold and pink for maximum statement, one in red, white and blue for the full 90s athletic callback. Both work in exactly the way they’re supposed to.

Kylie Jenner is a strange figure to think about in the context of design. She’s the youngest member of a family that turned visibility into a business model so successfully that the model eventually started producing real taste—or real enough that the distinction stops mattering. The COEEZE collection didn’t feel like a celebrity licensing deal. It felt like something she actually wanted to wear. Whether that’s sophisticated marketing or genuine instinct, I’ve genuinely stopped being able to tell, and I suspect she has too.