We Generation

Adam Kimmel was fashion’s new big thing until he decided not to be. Now he’s back, recharged and redirected, as creative chief at desk space disruptor WeWork

- Nick Compton

As second-act professional re-routings go, Adam Kimmel’s is an attention grabber. In the late noughties, the native New Yorker was the next big thing in men’s fashion. Kimmel’s designs reimagined and outfitted his kind of American hero, from cowboys to SoHo bohemians, Jackson Pollock to Snoop Dogg. He also helped revolutionise the way fashion brands communicated what they did and who they were. Circumnavigating the conventional catwalk show, he used film – a tuxedoed David Blaine swimming in a tank of sharks – and theatre, including a casino full of models wearing oversized masks designed by George Condo.

His now much-sought-after lookbooks were born of loose drop-in sessions and his clothes were modelled by everyone from hotshot young photographer Ryan McGinley to LA art eminence John Baldessari and actor/artist/photographer and counterculture totem Dennis Hopper. Kimmel, in a way nobody else quite had, suggested fashion was an integral part of the larger creative enterprise. But, in 2012, he shocked the industry by cancelling his spring/summer 2013 show. He wanted to take a year off, he said, to spend time with his young family, to experiment, to learn and grow. That year came and went and Kimmel all but disappeared from view (his reputation as a designer of contemporary fashion grew in his absence). Last year, though, he reemerged as the new chief creative officer of desk space disruptor WeWork.

Founded in New York in 2010 by Adam Neumann (now CEO) and Miguel McKelvey, WeWork has grown from niche darling of MacBook and backpack freelance hot-deskers to very serious supplier and manager of office space around the world, as disruptive in its market as Airbnb has been in hospitality. A new round of funding this spring from its largest investor, the Japanese SoftBank, will push WeWork’s valuation to at least $40bn, making it one of the world’s most valuable private companies.