The KHY x Gia Borghini collection dropped on 21 August, marking Kylie Jenner’s first move into footwear, and the campaign she shot to announce it offers a fairly precise account of the brand’s aesthetic ambitions: minimal, Italian, and built around the kind of shoe that reads as an outfit in itself.
For a label that began in ready-to-wear, the expansion into shoes is a logical next chapter. Jenner has been building KHY as a tight, considered edit rather than a volume play, and footwear has always been the category that either confirms or undermines that kind of positioning. A poorly chosen collaboration can make a brand look opportunistic; the right one locks in a point of view. Gia Borghini, a WWD-noted footwear and accessories brand that has previously worked with Silvia Tcherassi and Elsa Hosk, sits at the quieter, more architectural end of the contemporary market. The match is coherent.
Crafted in Italy, Reworked Until They Felt Effortless
Jenner has been specific about the process behind the KHY x Gia Borghini collection. ‘I’ve worn Gia Borghini for years, so this one felt right,’ she told Who What Wear. ‘I got to create my dream footwear for Khy, handmade in Italy. I reworked every detail over and over until they felt just right and completely effortless.’ The shoes were crafted in Italy in partnership with Gia Borghini, a detail that matters for a market already saturated with celebrity lines that outsource both the design decisions and the manufacturing. Handmade construction, reworked details: these are the language of heritage shoemaking, and deploying them signals that this is not a straight licensing arrangement.
The campaign itself leans into that restraint. Jenner wore a strapless black leather micro minidress, body-skimming and straight-necklined, and sat on the floor surrounded by pairs from the collection. The staging, with shoes scattered as objects rather than worn as a complete look, reads like a deliberate decision: the dress is the neutral field, and the shoes are what you’re supposed to look at. The smooth leather finish of the dress and the clean lines of the footwear operate in the same register without competing.
The KHY x Gia Borghini Collection’s Styles
The collection spans several silhouettes. The campaign shows sleek metallic sandals and minimalist kitten heels alongside the statement Muse wedge, available in both silver and black leather. It is a tight range rather than an exhaustive one, which is consistent with how KHY has operated in clothing: edits, not catalogues. The styling throughout the campaign reinforces that logic. Jenner kept accessories to slim rectangular wire-frame glasses and a warm, matte lip; her hair pin-straight with a centre part. The effect, deliberately or not, is closer to a magazine shoot than a product launch, the kind of pared-back image-making that places the object above the personality holding it.
There is a longer story here about the relationship between celebrity brands and craft credentials. At one end of the spectrum, a name goes on a shoe and that is the entirety of the proposition. At the other, a genuine point of view gets worked out through a proper creative process with a manufacturing partner who knows what they are doing. Jenner’s emphasis on iteration and on handmaking in Italy is a claim to the second category, and Gia Borghini’s track record with other collaborators, each of whom has worked within the brand’s particular architectural language, gives that claim some structural support. Whether the market reads it that way depends partly on the shoes themselves, which are now available.
The collection had a quiet public preview before its formal drop. WWD reported that Jenner had already worn a silver pair from the collaboration to an NBA Finals game, alongside partner Timothée Chalamet. An arena is not a runway, but it is a high-visibility test of whether a shoe works in the world rather than just in a campaign. The silver pair passed it. Jenner captioned the Instagram announcement simply: ‘khy x @giaborghini is here xx.’ The collection is available now.
