day fifty-five - the fleeting phenomenon that was Kain Label
Upon further reflection, it’s probably not entirely interesting to detail every single thing I donated, though I maintain it’s a fascinating personal exercise. Your clothes don’t just live in your closet, they come with you on all sorts of adventures, and can even weave their way into your memories (I cop to that cloth pun). So I won’t be writing about my high school gym shoes, or the Urban Outfitters long sleeve that shockingly held strong for over a decade, but I definitely wanted to write about Kain Label tops as I wound up donating three of them last week.
For those who aren’t familiar, Kain Label was an LA brand founded in 2007 that made $90 t-shirts. That’s pretty much it, that’s their story, except somehow they found themselves adorning reality TV stars and doing one of the first clothing collabs with Goop. They were stocked at shopbop and Revolve and Saks, did a stint at Net-A-Porter, had such apparent reach as to earn a write up on NBC’s Philadelphia site, but now can only be found on such illustrious marketplaces as ThredUP, Poshmark, and eBay, because Kain Label no longer exists.
Having had every single one of my ridiculously expensive Kain tees and tanks develop irreparable runs, I could see why the brand folded, but what remains crazy to me is that I can’t find a single article announcing the closure. The brand’s website has simply expired, their Facebook page last posted in May of 2017 when it announced a sale.
It was almost poetic to me that this brand that made clothes too fragile to wear was seemingly also too fragile to have a digital legacy, but I couldn’t let the mystery go so used all my google skills and found that the sisters behind Kain Label started a still-running kids clothing line called Roux. I learned this via a blog post without a date, and clicked through to the Roux site which has no “about,” so I officially give up on trying to learn any more about why or when Kain Label folded.
There’s maybe a lesson in here and it might just be that “fashion is fleeting.” The other lesson is maybe “don’t spend $90 on sheer one-size-fits-all* t-shirts.”
I will say that if the Kain sisters’ goal was to create the softest tee I have ever owned that they succeeded - I loved the feel and drape of these shirts so much that I had a dozen of them and wore them at least once a week. If the Kain sisters’ goal was to make a soft-as-vintage tee that was made well enough to become vintage itself, they abysmally failed - these three tops went to Goodwill not because I didn’t like them anymore but because they all had run (or in one case, shrunk) past the point of being societally acceptable to wear. So yeah. Don’t spend $90 on a sheer one-size-fits-all t-shirt.
