260116 How Kith Got Lisa to Guest Design its new Women’s Collection

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>Last year, K-pop star Lisa added acting to her resumé with her debut role as Mook in season three of The White Lotus. This year, she’s adding designer to her list of accomplishments. Today, Kith is announcing that Lisa is the guest designer of Kith Women’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, dropping on January 20.

>CEO and creative director Ronnie Fieg first met Lisa in 2024, when the Blackpink star starred in the brand’s SS24 campaign. The pair were connected before then by Lisa’s manager, Alice Kang, who is a relative of Fieg’s childhood friend. “Lisa was a fan of the brand and wanted to wear the product. The conversation started really organically, me sending her a bunch of stuff, then it turned into a conversation of shooting her for a campaign,” Fieg says. “We built a relationship from there.” Now, Lisa has moved behind the scenes, co-designing a new collection for Kith Women SS26.

>It was Lisa’s 2024 campaign shoot that signaled to Fieg that they could work on something bigger and more creative together. “She’s very detail-oriented and very particular about what she likes and why she likes certain things,” he says. “I really love that about her. I love that about anyone.”

>To Fieg, Lisa was the embodiment of his vision for Kith Women. “She ends up being the muse on the [mood]board for the kind of woman that we want to speak to. She has this amazing style where we have tears of her where she’s out, and then we have tears of her where she’s working [on stage],” he says. So Fieg wanted to bring her into the fold of the brand.

>The design process was collaborative, Fieg says. “It’s not your typical ‘design and throw a name on it’,” he says of the collection, which will be available in February. “She was involved through the whole process — while she was on tour, while she was traveling, she was Zooming in, we did fittings with her, we ideated with her. The first round of samples was fit on her. So she was really involved in every detail along the way.”

>To date, Kith Women collaborations have been few and far between — especially compared with Kith Men, which has collaborated with everyone from Giorgio Armani to On Running to Marvel. Now, the creative director feels the timing is right for Kith Women, which he launched 10 years ago, five years after Kith Men was established.

>Kith has evolved since its early days of hype and has pushed into a more refined aesthetic realm as Fieg himself has grown up, and pulled back from showing on a regular cadence in favor of prioritizing product and collaborations. Kith has also opened a member’s club, Kith Ivy, complete with padel courts and Erewhon’s only New York outpost (just the juice bar, though.) In recent years, Fieg has put more time and investment into Kith Women, opening a new Soho flagship in December 2023. At the same time, he appointed Daniëlle Cathari as creative director, who exited the following year. (Kith Women hasn’t hired a replacement.)

>In Fieg’s view, it’s in the past year that Kith Women really found its groove, under the direction of Kith Women’s senior design director Katie Kim, who has been at the company since March 2020. “The collections we have done in the past year have been really successful. I’m really happy with how far the women’s collection has come,” he says, referencing both the quality of materials and construction of the garments. Kith Women’s latest collection includes a chocolate brown scarf coat with a subtle all-over Kith jacquard; faux fur-lined bombers; and suiting — as well as plenty of logo-ed sweaters. Like Kith Men, Kith Women has matured over time while maintaining its more sporty edge.

>With this, Fieg feels Kith Women has established a strong enough identity to now bring a new perspective, Lisa’s, into the fold. The collection plays on existing Kith codes but, as Fieg puts it, is built around “every facet of her”. “It’s taken a little longer in terms of getting our footing and creating a really strong identity and DNA, before we can lend our DNA to a collaborative project,” he says. “Now it’s finally getting to the point where I feel really strongly about our stance in the women’s fashion world, our category of products — I feel like we have a stronghold on who we are in women’s.”

>Fieg is confident that the Kith woman will buy into Lisa’s world. So far, he’s only seen the collection on one person: the star herself. But he’s confident that it will resonate with his consumer. “She really [stands] for everything that we want the Kith woman to be.”