The Hustle Behind Kids of Immigrants

BY: ALEXANDER LENDRUM

There isn’t a city, town or village on our shared planet Earth where you won’t find someone making a living from nothing. Be it the family selling freshly squeezed juice from a cart, to the old lady that stops by every single day to offer her day’s worth of farmed goods, to the kid that you see approaching you from down the subway isle with a box full of unopened packets of gum. Everyone hustles, therefore everyone has the capability to make something for themselves. This is the ethos that has driven burgeoning fashion brand Kids of Immigrants, the brainchild behind Daniel Buezo and Weleh Dennis that focuses on positivity, with an emphasis on beauty of cross-heritage.

The brand serves as a labor of love outside of their current jobs–Daniel is currently the Head Stylist for songstress Kehlani, and works at Opening Ceremony (for the love of fashion over financial necessity), and Weleh is in the humble profession of teaching–however with a recent pop-up at OC, and through the help of those that have supported the brand, which includes the likes of Big Sean, Kehlani and Lil Uzi Vert, KYLE, Olivia O’Brien and Grace Weber to name a few, the imprint has garnered the very love and support that it puts out through its hand-made pieces and the messages it portrays.

Coming from the small bedroom-turned-workstation in the heart of Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Daniel and Weleh devote themselves to turning myriad threads picked up at thrift stores wherever they go, patching the often overlooked design elements or pieces from the fit into a cohesive DIY/Punk-infused aesthetics ranging in mostly oversized basic outerwear and T-Shirts. But like most startup brand stories that succumb to wrong side of success, Kids of Immigrants maintain their understanding of the roots of the brand, choosing to give back their community and simple “do the best they can with what they have.”