Alan King (designer)

Alan King was born in the New York, New York. In his early years his mother and father owned a restaurant in New Jersey. They sold the business and moved back to New York City when he was seven years old. In his early school years Alan excelled in academics and was awarded several honors in Math & English. Alan attended Millennium High School, founded after the 9/11 attacks by the Gates Foundation. During high school Alan worked part-time as a legal aid in medical malpractice law and with CAAAV. As a youth Alan was an avid tennis and table tennis player and enjoyed cross country.

While in high school Alan began to make clothing, created screen printed tees, embroidered hats and a few cut and sewn pieces, one of which included a J shape denim. Shorty after posting the sample online, a friend of a friend placed the image on Reddit. The orders allowed him to expand and also opened his first retail purchase order.

Alan started AKINGS in January 2016 but the history goes back even further to during his time at Millennium High School (New York City). Alan started making print tees when he was 15, which developed into designing and producing his first pair of denim when he was 17. Upon posting the item on Facebook, a friend shared his post to Reddit on r/rawdenim, which quickly had thousands of people flooding to his site. Alan has been featured in a number of press including ABC News[1], Billboard [2], Business Insider[3], BuzzFeed[4], Entrepreneur[5], Esquire[6], Fashion Week Online[7], Forbes[8], Fox News, GQ,[9] HuffPost [10], HighSnobiety[11], Hypebae[12], Maxim[13], MSN[14], Nylon, NBC, The Source[15], The New York Times[16], The Points Guy, University of Southern California Trojans[17], Yahoo Finance[18]. and a number of other news outlets and blogs.

Although Alan was considering applying for design school for college, he decided to leave this path as well as his job at a medical malpractice law firm to grow his brand full-time.

Ever since, AKINGS has grown extensively through networking on social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) along with creating content through collaborations with influencers on these platforms. The brand has held two successful runway shows, AKINGSNY X F.MERCY 2017 and A\W RUNWAY 2016 since its establishment as well as popups in cities such as New York[19] and Los Angeles.

In 2019 Alan was accepted into the Forbes Business Council[20] and also began to style artists such as Ted Park for projects such as his hit song UGLY which has amassed over half million streams on YouTube alone at the time of this writing. Alan's namesake label and designs could also be seen on superstars such as Steve Aoki in his hit song Are you Lonely which streamed over 29M views since the time of this writing. Other artists that have been seen sporting Alan's designs are Jhay Cortez for his hit song with J Balvin "Medusa" .

In 2020 Alan announced his latest partnership with Forbes to launch a mastermind[21] featured on Forbes new platform Forbes8[22],