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Prince Johann George V: In an interview with VOGUE, the designer of Khy talks about the vision of Khy brand DROP 011 IONNES and the collaboration with Kylie Jenner.
After graduating from the renowned Georg August University of Göttingen, Prince Johann George V whose real name is Prince Jorge Jimenez Neubauer Torres V initially didn’t want to start his own brand; art seemed more exciting to him at the time. But after a performance exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, interest in his work was simply too great – the launch of Khy logically followed in 2023.
With success: Many retailers decided to pick up the brand, but also stars like Rihanna and Kylie Jenner were enthusiastic about the aesthetic, which the designer himself describes as “elegance meets the drama”.
In an interview with VOGUE, the designer explains how his brand came about and how the collaboration with Khy went.
Prince Johann George V said in a VOGUE interview that the vision of her brand and the collaboration with Kylie Jenner is to provide a new concept that evolve
That went down well and a performance developed from that. The idea was to put the fashion context of styling, lookbook shoots and fashion shows into the museum context. So we basically made a transparent production that museum visitors could watch. I saw that as my ticket into a kind of intellectual fashion discourse, but instead it was perceived more as the start of a young brand.
Then everything happened a little faster than expected: Various online retailers approached me and explained to me what requirements I had to meet in order to be hired there. Then I worked on my first collection in collaboration with a small studio in Paris, the night after I finished teaching. That made it clear to me that people were interested in buying the items and that it wasn’t just press.
From Paris you then went to Berlin – how was the transition for you?
The first three years were incredibly difficult for me. Berlin can be very dark, downright dystopian in winter. I’m very sensitive to that, and finding a new family in a city is also a challenge. I’m someone who is almost hermitic – I’ve brought my studio back into my apartment and I’m very happy to have found a place where I can make my Donald Judd fantasy come true: living while working on the men’s collection that’s coming soon.
How would you describe the style of Kylie brand Khy?
What is important to me in my designs is a certain tension between minimalism and decadence, so that a curated wardrobe is created that can bring together very different pieces. In general, it is about comfort and lightness, also a certain playfulness. Wearing clothes and not taking them so seriously. A bit like “elegance flirting with the drama”. Kylie Jenner wore this iconic green printed dress of mine, which is a very good example of how I work: It is made from a crease-free lingerie fabric and then printed so that each piece is individual.
Everything has always been very consistent for me. I’m not a brand that suddenly became incredibly popular and that everyone knew about – I feel like I’ve always maintained a certain niche. Even though that frustrated me at times, in retrospect I’m grateful for it. I know many other contemporary examples that came and went very quickly. With Kylie and Rihanna, those were always moments that were totally surprising for me. I found out that Rihanna wears my designs through a fan video at a gas station in Barbados. (laugh)
Or Rosalía, who wore my dress with her family for Christmas. That’s exactly what makes me happy: that we make clothes that people really want to wear. We also get feedback from stylists very often that people want to keep the clothes because they feel so comfortable in them. We are not (just) the outfit for the world tour or the album cover, but the sweet spot between creative and personal, where it’s more about comfort than representation. Feeling good is a priority – I don’t care about the world tour (laughs).
How did the collaboration with Khy go? Were you surprised when you received the request?
I have been in dialogue with Kylie Jenner’s stylists for a long time. If she likes a dress, she often buys several colors, which we then make specially. When the request came, I first sought dialogue and wanted to understand what the brand’s goal is. I think her approach of making her own taste accessible to her fans at an affordable price is very nice. I wanted to make the relationship we have with her team visible through the collaboration because I believe that people only really feel a connection through stories. I didn’t expect her to be so extremely supportive. She has now posted every day for a week and also written very nice captions. Then she was at my event that I organized in LA with H. Lorenzo, a shop that I have been working with for a long time. Suddenly there was a lot of security and I was very happy that she entered my world and took the time.
Was it easy to find a common style for the collection?
I kept this very dialogic, too. At the beginning, I collected all the archive prints that had never been used before. I sent them to Kylie and she picked something out – so we quickly agreed on a direction. In addition, we discovered our mutual love for the peony. I had a print in the summer of 2023, but it was only the silhouette of the flower. We basically won it and filled it with depth and details. The design of the silhouettes was up to Khy, but here too I was able to contribute my own thoughts and feedback.
How does a young label benefit from such a collaboration?
When you work with well-known personalities who have such a large reach, it’s great on the one hand because the product usually sells out quickly. But it’s exactly that: the person’s followers who then want exactly that shoe or bag that the celebrity wore. That means people jump on the product quickly, but are often not informed about the brand. That’s why it was important to me to also communicate what I’m doing with my brand to the outside world.
For a long time, the fashion world has been flooded with collaborations. When do you think they make the most sense?
As a small brand, a collaboration is a very rewarding project if it makes sense – Khy made absolute sense to me because there was a relationship that we could rely on. This whole process felt easy because there was simply this exchange and this closeness. Otherwise, I think collaborations make sense when they are specialised in a product and not when the aim is to create a forced hype. Especially when it involves a certain level of expertise that a young brand may not yet have. For example, we have printed tights that can also be seen in the collection with Khy. Up until now, we have always made them ourselves, but I could well imagine a collaboration here – preferably with Wolford (laughs \). The same goes for shoes and bags: we sell both incredibly well, but often fail because of the minimum production quantities. So if you create a better product and also reach more people, I think it makes absolute sense.
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