KOTN Taps Alana Hadid & More for ‘Nothing to Declare’ FW Campaign

There is, among people who live at some geographical remove from the place they call home, a second and largely unacknowledged economy, conducted not in money but in suitcase space. Its governing principle is simple - if someone is going back, something must go back with them. Advil for mama, a case for a telephone discontinued six years ago, a mysterious commodity an aunt insists cannot be purchased there (although you have personally purchased it there) and, arriving late in the proceedings, a voice note from somebody you met once at a wedding, asking whether you might have room for “one small thing.”

This highly specific social predicament supplies the plot of KOTN’s FW26 campaign, “Nothing to Declare,” directed by Kim Sauce. Its casting is unusually good at completing the joke. Alana Hadid, Lebanese comedian Nataly Aukar, chef and author Samah Dada, Albanian-American rapper Big Body Bes and Righteous Eats founder Jaeki Cho - whose work documenting immigrant-run restaurants has produced a kind of edible counter-map of New York - appear alongside MD Hossain, Amir Hamja, Zina Louhaichy, Arsh Raziuddin, Monica Hanna, Harvey Leon and Abubakr Ali. Then there are the people whose businesses make up the geography of the campaign itself: Karen Liu of Grand Tea & Imports, Hemal and Rohan Sheth of Iconic Magazines, and Osiris of El Castillo. The city here is not Manhattan in the abstract but the immigrant New York of errands; the shopkeeper, the magazine you cannot find elsewhere and, ultimately, the additional stop that somehow materialises between the “final stop” and “home.”

The clothes inhabit this world rather than interrupt it, which suits KOTN, an Egyptian-Canadian label whose own biography is essentially a story about what travels and what survives the journey. Co-founder Rami Helali’s search for a better T-shirt led him to the cotton-growing communities of Egypt’s Nile Delta; today, the certified B Corp works with thousands of smallholder farmers there.

So FW26 concerns itself with another sort of provenance - the objects, obligations and affections perpetually shuttling between one home and another. Nothing to declare? Hardly.