It all started with a stolen shirt. Specifically, it’s about a piece of clothing that Papo Kling illegally took from his girlfriend at the time after he was surprised to see several women asking him about her on the street. He traveled to Thailand with the stolen shirt to find a workshop where the design could be recreated for a few euros, using the money he had earned in an shady business with the “son of a big businessman.” , a commissioned production. “In the book I tell it a bit as if it were Indiana Jones,” recalls Kling (46 years old, Buenos Aires), who at the time was an Argentine immigrant studying sociology in Madrid, “but the truth is, if you it is.” When you’re in your early twenties and want to go on adventures, anything is an excuse. I think that was an excuse because I never thought about starting a clothing brand. I just had a desire to live, a desire to get out of the terrible job I had in a bar in Alonso Martínez,” he says on the phone.
It all started with a stolen T-shirt. And copied: “I want to demystify this creation thing a little bit. In the West, copying has been a kind of soul-stealing since the Enlightenment; The Chinese have a different opinion and that is why they shamelessly copy everything because they believe that the improvement will be visible in the copy. When you copy, you take what is good and improve it by adding something of your own. Everything is invented, creation rearranges the things that are out there and perhaps gives them new meaning. This happened with our first t-shirt, which was a hit. When I saw that Zara had copied it, I said, “Well, maybe I can use it to do something more than just pay for diving trips.”
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Papo Kling and cover of the book “Exposed Fracture” (Círculo de Tiza), images from the publisher.
Back in Madrid, at the beginning of this century, he began selling the clothes in the temple of modernity, the Fuencarral market. They soon began wearing the Kling label. The Valencia filter didn’t even exist yet and everything depended on the flash of the digital camera and the subsequent editing in Fotolog. While velvet tracksuits triumphed in New York or Los Angeles, the blogs here followed the colorful minidresses of Patricia Conde, a national style icon of those years. Kling’s clothing quickly went viral, at a time when the term was still being coined. “We were one of the first brands in what later went viral. We’re talking about 2004, 2008, there wasn’t even Instagram yet, but I was horrified to see the power of social networks, I saw that they were a Pandora’s box. So much so that it never occurred to me to have my own. But this power, which scared me at that moment, helped us a lot to make ourselves known, that is undeniable.”
There is also no denying that there was something about her collections, with their naive prints and affordable prices, that attracted young women of this generation. “We carved out a niche for ourselves because we broke some of that logic that we had to sell. We did fun things, things we weren’t worried about selling, things we liked. At least in the beginning, all decisions were based on what was attractive to us and what created a unique identity; Rather, it creates identity. The problem with brands is that when they get caught up in the logic of sales, the algorithm and all that, the essence disappears. I wasn’t even interested in fashion, I was interested in art, cinema, literature, music. I found the unusual, the strange color combinations, the ugly, funny. And I think a lot of people caught those codes.”
From the VIP room to the courts
Papo Kling speaks without reserve or modesty and likes to denounce the system that welcomed him exuberantly and then rejected him out of hand. He confirms the cliché that Argentines are great storytellers in the interview and in the book he has just published about his experiences, “Exposed Fracture” (Círculo de Tiza). He does this through the sentence with which he opens the story: “The logical thing would have been to tell this story a few years earlier and perhaps in a different way, but I think it makes sense to tell it from that morning in April 2015, when I knew within five minutes of the meeting that not only was my company going bankrupt, but that I also had a good chance of ending up in prison.”
Just a few years earlier, in 2013, the company had a turnover of 17.5 million euros, had just begun its successful expansion in the United States, selling in hundreds of points of sale in countries such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy and in 15 own stores throughout Spain. At the head of the almost one and a half thousand employees was the creator of everything, Papo, who traveled the world on business and made new alliances: “I don’t remember enjoying anything at all. The moments that should have been happiness or personal and professional fulfillment were always accompanied by the sword of Damocles. I started to enjoy it when I started writing remotely, when I had been out of the fashion world for a while and had completely lost touch with Kling when I found out she was closing for good . I still remember dejectedly boarding planes to fly to Asia, staying in hotels and wondering what the hell I was doing here. On the one hand, there was a desire for economic independence, for the implementation of my project, but my training told me that I was committing an aberration, that I was polluting the planet, that I was working in a difficult, enormously opaque industry and suspicious of terrible labor practices.
Kling released several collections each year, all made in Southeast Asian countries in working conditions that often violated human rights. The brand produced almost a million items of clothing annually, which became part of the disposable clothing wheel that was then beginning. Fast fashion, which has now become more and more widespread and is now ultra (hyper) fast. A wheel that, once it starts turning, cannot be stopped. “It is easy to confuse the needs of the market, the needs of the system, with our own needs. I didn’t need to grow, I didn’t need to open stores, I didn’t need subsidiaries in other countries, I didn’t need franchises… but you are fooled by a logic that leads you there over time. There is a narrative about entrepreneurship that gets you there. I realized, perhaps too late, that I was not working for myself, but for capital, for the banks. We were selling more and more, we were doing better and better, so we had to borrow more and more money to commission the productions. That was part of the pull that pulled me in and it all started to create little cracks, little breaks.”
It is easy to confuse the needs of the market, the needs of the system, with our own needs. I didn’t need to grow, I didn’t need to open stores, I didn’t need subsidiaries in other countries, I didn’t need franchises…
Until the precarious balance was destroyed by a deadly cocktail of bad luck and worse decisions. Here’s how he tells it in the book: “An out-of-control investment to land in the United States, a few overly artistic collections that didn’t sell, a European winter with almost no cold, the delay of two containers of coats.” came late in the spring, a Greek agent was in financial difficulties, an alleged fire at a Chinese supplier’s factory, all this was added to disastrous financial management by a criminal, and then came this enormous stream of happiness that would never stop screaming Stop.” . “The United States was very good,” the Argentinean now remembers, “but the entire expansion had to be financed, the logistics were very complex and I was not prepared.” I didn’t have the capacity. While I had the opportunity to bring together a group of artists and creatives, I was unprepared to build an efficient business. “That’s how it fell apart.” And so he came to the meeting that opens his book, where he learned that his creditors were prepared to take him to court.
Window display of one of the many shops that Kling has opened in Spain.Facebook Kling
“I had a critical eye, but I allowed myself to be seduced. We were doing well, we were selling, the stylists were coming to the showroom, to the parties and everyone was saying it was fantastic. We were a magnet that attracted many artists and creative people. But we were never approached by a single investor. We were dreamers and were not at all interested in business matters. I was only interested because I had to pay the salaries of a gigantic structure, but we didn’t really care about the deal. And that is a mistake. In the book I try to say it’s a mistake, because if you’re not interested in the business, you’re doing something else, you’re creating a foundation, something outside of the market. But my mistake was that I thought I could make a difference within the market and with my rules. That’s not possible: these are rules that have been perfectly defined for at least 200 years and for the last 30 years everything has been a question of financing. Fashion is no longer an industrial issue, but only a financial matter. Fashion is a financial business because money is constantly in circulation. If you look at the millionaire rankings, there are always technology companies, oil companies… and the textile industry. “Fashion is a very powerful business.”
Papo Kling sold his company to a group of investors in 2016 and gradually left the company, which was finally closed exactly a year ago after the outbreak of the pandemic. Today he dedicates himself to writing for a content channel about philosophy and politics and collaborates with some media in Argentina: “I write, I make a political program… I’m in a different phase; or maybe the same as always, with a 15-year break.”