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Welcome to Fashion In Flux, a look at how the last year has changed the fashion industry — including how its creatives are coping, innovating, and moving forward. In this story, we talk with model Wisdom Kaye who is known for his fashionable Tiktoks and as a result, got signed to IMG last year.
As the critic Wayne Koestenbaum once wrote, fashion moves forward through reinvention, most of them cosmetic. The video-sharing app TikTok, which has more than 1 billion monthly active users, is suited to those small reinventions that we have throughout the day. While the platform is known for dance challenges, viral memes, and trending songs like “Old Town Road,” TikTok also has an ebullient fashion scene.
Twenty-year-old Wisdom Kaye is one of the TikTok creators impacting the fashion industry. He often posts for his over 5.3 million followers from the same little corner in his house on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. In front of a champagne-colored carpet and beige wall with white baseboard molding, he has posted images of thousands of outfits. Against that blank canvas and an occasional jaunt outside, Kaye posts outfits inspired by anime characters, fashion for mail runs, TikTok sounds interpreted as outfits, AE ads, or runway looks on a budget. He gives intimate glam, erupting volcano, cozy student. He gives “sassy, moody, nasty.”
Naturally, all of this has gotten him attention beyond social media. IMG scouted Kaye, who is six feet four, through TikTok, and signed him last year. He has since worked with Dior, Fendi, Ralph Lauren, Coach, and Revlon, though some of their more traditional venues, like Fashion Month, have been suspended because of the pandemic.
“It’s not out of the norm,” says Kaye of how TikTok is challenging the fashion industry. “I feel like social media is becoming a big part of everyone’s life. It’s more like, ‘Hey, there you are.’ The next whatever.”
Kaye's posts that provoke the most inspiration and narrative are the temporal vignettes and outfit transitions, carefully edited and filled with a range of compositions. A “week at a glance” or “fave fits from August,” for instance, are videos that track his extraordinary range, versatility, and unexpected exuberance. “I try to be different in everything I do,” he says. “Not just in my looks, but in the way I shoot my videos.”
Before he even joined TikTok, Wisdom Kaye was making TikToks. His first TikTok, in January of last year, was initially uploaded as a video on Twitter. He posted a compilation of outfits and shot images around the Texas State University campus, where he was a student. “I just had one of my friends help me out," he explains, "just record me a couple seconds every day.”
When Teen Vogue spoke to him in March, Kaye, who is taking a break from school to focus on work, wore a mint beanie, floral button-up, and his near-signature, oversized square glasses. He has made the most of TikTok’s interactivity, where his followers put him up to challenges. Lately, his favorite is to make outfits based on characters on cartoon shows, like Courage the Cowardly Dog or The Powerpuff Girls. “There’s an element of nostalgia there which I like,” he says. “I like blending elements.” Many of his videos have a sense of humor that resonates with #FashionTok. In “how fashion dudes be on TikTok" or “things influencers do that I can’t stand,” Kaye turns the joke back on himself, doing ridiculously extra poses, such as lying flat on the sidewalk to get the shot.
Even with the levity of a post such as “outfits that would get death stares in my southern hometown,” there is a tinge of fashion criticism at its most integral: how clothes interact with gender, race, politics, geography, and how clothes inform identity and power. Kaye’s interest in fashion started in high school, where he used personal style as a form of self-defense after dealing with bullying. “I was not trying to stand out,” he recalls. “I was already this super-tall kid. It’s already like, ‘There he is,’ you know what I mean?”
With firsthand knowledge of the power of fashion, he has since taken control of his look. The impossible task of fashion is that it changes both everything and nothing. “No piece of clothing is going to change who you are, right?” he asks.
With regard to gender expression in men’s fashion beyond the binary, he insists he’s not making a statement. “I have a lot of things all over my wardrobe from the women’s section. They fit me nicely and look good on me, so I’m gonna wear them,” he says, despite the occasional hater in his comments or dealing with fear of Trump supporters. “Five-inch heels, for example: I don’t wear them for any reason other than I like them.”
As Bianca Betancourt wrote in early April, Twitter is a place where Black fashion critics have usurped the predominantly white establishment, its capitulation to corporations, and its lack of critique. Like the rest of the platform, TikTok’s fashion community (Kaye likes Nava Rose) is a little more about the fun, the immersion, the sarcasm, the dazzling self-representation, the cinematic, the remix. As always, brands have taken note. See: Noen Eubanks and Celine, Emma Chamberlain and Louis Vuitton, or Chase Hudson and Dolce & Gabbana.
Creators are drawn to TikTok for its varied algorithm that does not rely solely on follower count. Anyone can get spotlighted through what the company calls its “For You” section of the app, a page of infinite videos tailored to each user, arguably easier to beat than Instagram, which is notoriously biased (though TikTok is not without shadowbanning and discrimination). “The fact that anyone can post a video and it can go viral is something very, very unique,” Kaye points out. “What TikTok really has a leg up on is that discoverability aspect.”
There is a sense of discovery not only for the average TikTok user but also for the industry. “If you had asked me, let’s say, my freshman year, when I was trying to find myself, I wouldn’t have told you I’d be a model years later," Kaye says. "But when it happened, it didn’t feel too out of place because in a weird way, I recorded my own videos and took photos of myself. I had always been sort of modeling; when I actually got into it, it never felt too uncomfortable.”
On TikTok, Kaye is the creative director, the model, the stylist, the photographer, etc. The pared-down responsibility of modeling adds a more demanding focus on the body, a different kind of gaze. “It’s no secret that sometimes when things are completely relied on, like your image and your body," Kaye says, "you can start to get a little bit self-conscious here and there.”
Still: “It’s been great,” he repeats three times. “I’ve gotten to do more than I ever had done, ever — go more places and see more things.” Sometimes the travel is fiction. Kaye recently styled outfits he would wear at designer shows, like a Fendi print or the exaggerated proportions of Yohji Yamamoto. If it weren’t for the pandemic, he would indeed be invited to some New York shows, participating in an industry he has impacted but only minimally experienced. Even if a little less mobile, he’s on the move, ready for reinventions big and small. He has a few projects lined up. “It’s kind of hard to choose the best one to focus on next,” Kaye says. “I’m keepin’ it chill and busy.”
Credits:
Photographer: Cary Fagan
Photo Assistant: Dom Noboa
Stylist: Michelle Li and Joshua Springer
Production Assistant: Miranda Appedole
Groomer: Misty Rockwell
Production: Louisiana Mei Gelpi
Art Director: Emily Zirimis
Fashion Director: Tahirah Hairston
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