Designer Colm Dillane has had a passion for football all his life— from creating football jerseys to building a pitch on his rooftop to owning a junior league club. This former professional player (yes!) went all out for his fashion collection to celebrate the World Cup 2026. We met him ahead for this year’s issue of SEPP 2026.
“Who won the game?” KidSuper (a.k.a. Colm Dillane) asks as I’m ushered into a tiny office located in the designer’s sprawling studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in early May. “Arsenal,” someone says. There is a visible sign of disappointment on Dillane’s typically bright-eyed mien when he hears the news that Arsenal has just defeated Atlético Madrid. “Arsenal is the favorite team of Brooklyn hipsters,” Dillane sighs. On the surface, the 34-year-old fits the bill of a Brooklyn hipster, but this New York-born designer is no arriviste when it comes to football. He’s a die-hard fan, patron and former professional player— but more on that later.
And despite having spent the night before finishing up a last-minute look for Miles Chamley-Watson, the three-time Olympic fencing champion, for the Met Gala in New York, and currently preparing for a launch party with Jameson Irish Whiskey to celebrate a new capsule collection at his Brooklyn studio, Dillane seems most interested in the latest football scores. His prediction for the 2026 World Cup champions? “I want Portugal to win it. It’s a nice continuation to their storyline and Ronaldo leaves a champion,” he says. I ask him his top five players and he takes a moment to think: Ronaldinho (“My god!”), Maradona, Ronaldo, Messi and Neymar.
Dillane’s passion for football is so strong that he’s recently built a pitch on the rooftop of his studio’s building. “It’s been great. We’ve had a couple of six-year-old birthday parties with a bunch of kids playing,” Dillane says. “We had a gender reveal party here. Someone even asked to do a bris.” Dillane seems amused at the out-of-left-field request but then again, the magic of KidSuper is his ability to say yes to so many things. Whether it’s building a football field for his friends, colleagues and the community; collaborating with a wide range of brands and individuals from Mercedes to Puma to Ed Sheeran; or building out his Willy-Wonka-meets-Andy-Warhol style factory in Brooklyn, Dillane is all in.
To get to the football pitch, one needs to navigate a labyrinth of rooms: there’s the KidSuper boutique and makeshift library; a screen printing room; a venue space to host monthly comedy shows as well as a hidden room that serves as a podcast studio. On the second floor there’s an art studio as well as props from various fashion shows scattered about. And then there’s the football pitch, an oasis in the middle of industrial Brooklyn.
To understand Dillane’s love of football, one needs to go back to his childhood. “My first word was ball. Like give me the ball,” he tells me. Dillane was born in the 80s in New York to an artist mother from Spain and an Irish father who was in sales. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have a ball at my feet. We moved around a lot for my dad’s job so I was in Mexico, Chicago, Wisconsin,” he recalls. “Football was the way I fit in and made friends.” Football was his lingua franca.
When his family moved back to New York, Dillane was accepted into the prestigious Brooklyn Tech high school. And while he excelled at math, he also had a passion for the arts and of course his love of football continued. At age 17, after he graduated high school, he moved to Bahia, Brazil to play professionally for a year (though he wasn’t paid). Upon his return to the United States, he attended New York University where he played football. “I broke a few records for the sport at college,” he says casually. But he was also making t-shirts and selling them out of his dorm which he had turned into a makeshift store, complete with spray-painted walls and racks of merchandise. The administration wasn’t too pleased and he was kicked out of the dorm. He moved into a live-work space in South Williamsburg which would become the incubator for his cult streetwear label and the KidSuper collective, a group of like-minded creatives. Dillane continued to make clothes but he also dabbled in making videos for musicians—one of them was Russ, whose album went platinum.
After a few capsule collection showings and DIY claymation videos for fashion week that featured dolls modeled after heroes like Salvador Dalí and, Pelé, of course, Dillane found himself on the schedule at Paris Fashion Week. But what really put KidSuper on the global fashion map was when Louis Vuitton invited him to collaborate on the fall 2023 menswear collection, after the untimely death of designer Virgil Abloh. Since then Dillane has staged some of fashion’s most colorful shows: an auction, a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil, and he even had his hero Ronaldinho walk the show, who modeled their “Colmdinho” collection of jerseys and track suits. The two met by happenstance: Dillane had posted something about Ronaldinho on social media and “some guy just DM’d me and said I can introduce you to him. I flew to Miami and had lunch with him and we became friends,” says Dillane. “I’ve even played with him!”
These days Dillane spends a lot of time in Miami. He is the co-owner, with the Colombian singer J Balvin, of the Super Niños football club, which is based in Florida. Their team is part of the Baller League, a six-a-side indoor soccer competition which started in Germany and now has expanded with teams in the United Kingdom and the United States. “I’m there almost every Thursday night if I’m in the country,” he tells me as he looks over some sneaker samples.
Dillane will head back again to Miami in June to show his FIFA-inspired collection, which features a collaboration with BAPE. He’s designed 48 different pairs of sneakers representing the 48 countries playing in the World Cup. He’ll then fly to Paris a few days later to show the collection at the end of the menswear calendar. It’s a bit of a whirlwind, but when it comes to fashion and football, Dillane is all in.
For the 2026 US Open, Naomi Osaka stepped onto the court in a custom KidSuper look by Colm Dillane.
This article first appeared in June, 2026 in SEPP FOOTBALL FASHION WORLD CUP 2026
