16 DALLAS OBSERVER • KALEIDOSCOPE The Tastemaker From Plano: How Bunny Kinney Has Defined Cool For A New Generation How a suburban misfit turned boredom, thrift store hunts and an M83 album cover into a blueprint for global coolness. BY PRESTON BARTA T here is a specific kind of alchemy that happens in the suburbs of North Texas. It’s a reaction sparked by the friction between the sprawling, sunbaked pavement and the desperate, burning need for something else. For Bunny Kinney – filmmaker, creative director and accidental icon of millen- nial nostalgia — that friction didn’t just shape his aesthetic; it forged his entire identity. Today, Kinney sits at the apex of cool as the executive creative director of Dazed Media, orchestrating the visual language of youth culture from London and lending his creative vision to global brands like Chanel, Dior, Gucci and Estée Lauder. But before he was launching avant-garde beauty magazines with Isamaya French or crafting posthu- mous visual tributes for Leonard Cohen, he was just a kid in Plano who didn’t quite fit in. “Those Texas years were so formative for me,” Kinney says to the Observer, his voice touched with nostalgia and fond- ness. “I feel like Texas is part of my lore.” That lore begins not in a smoky Parisian café or a New York loft, but at Barksdale Elementary in Plano. It winds through the halls of Arbor Creek Middle School and Hebron High in Carrollton, places that might seem nondescript to the casual observer, but were, for a young Kinney, the stage for a dramatic self-invention. Embracing the Unusual at Hebron High If you’ve seen the viral TikTok series SubwayTakes, hosted by Kareem Rahma, you might have caught a recent glimpse of Kin- ney. There he is, effortlessly articulate, debating the nuances of modern life while riding public transit. It’s a long way from the boy who felt like an alien in the cafeterias of Carrollton. “I didn’t really fit in,” Kinney recalls of his childhood. But rather than shrink away, he leaned in. The turning point came in eighth grade, that precarious precipice of identity formation. By ninth grade, Kinney decided he was done waiting for permission to ex- ist. “I went hard,” he says. “Being whatever kind of freak I wanted to be.” In the early 2000s, before algorithms dictated fashion trends, style was a scavenger hunt. For Kinney, the hunting grounds were specific and sacred. He shopped exclusively at Goodwill and vintage stores, treating Lower Greenville like it was the Champs-Élysées. “Downtown Dallas, Mockingbird Lane and Lower Greenville were like meccas,” he says. Even the Urban Outfitters near SMU felt epic—“a revelation back then,” he recalls. The Half Price Books in Plano and Premiere Video on Mockingbird Lane were “everything,” dusty cathedrals of media where he could lose him- self in stacks of paperbacks and used DVDs. It is a familiar pilgrimage for any creative kid who grew up in DFW: the drive down 75, the thrill of the Angelika Film Center on Mockingbird Lane, the feeling that culture was something you had to physically travel to find. “My local Blockbuster was an important tool for me to learn about what was out there in the world,” Kinney notes. It’s a senti- ment that dates him perfectly to that analog twilight — a time when you had to rent a physical tape to learn what the rest of the world looked like. Escaping Gym Class, Finding Warhol Kinney’s path to filmmaking was paved with a desire to avoid physical exertion. He enrolled in a media course at the Dale Jack- son Career Center (now closed and serving under Lewisville ISD Facility Services) primarily to get out of PE. “I want to be a filmmaker, but I think I might want to make mu- sic videos,” he remembers thinking. That whimsy hardened into ambition when he produced his final project: a video essay on Andy Warhol. It was an early signal of the curator’s eye he would later become famous for: a fascination with image, celebrity and the artifice of pop culture. His teachers noticed. Mr. Ruuska, who taught Media Tech at Dale Jackson, once told him, “Film school can wait. Stay and learn here, first.” But Kinney couldn’t. He graduated early, leaving Texas for Emerson College in Boston, eager to sharpen his skills. Yet, leaving Texas was bittersweet. “I left Dallas before I had the opportunity to mature into a meaningful creative relationship with it,” he admits. Like many who flee the nest early, he harbored a complex relationship with home. “Living in a place like that where I didn’t necessarily feel like I fit in, I sort of longed to know what else was out there.” The Face of a Generation Before he was a creative director, Kinney was, quite literally, the poster child for teenage longing. In 2008, M83 released Sat- urdays = Youth, an album that defined the synth-pop landscape of the late 2000s. On the cover is a young Bunny Kinney, looking ethereal and detached, embodying the very essence of youth that the album explored. His career trajectory since then reads like a creative director’s bucket list. He was creative director at youth fashion magazine i-D, and later at video channel Nowness, bringing a sleek, digi- From Plano thrift stores to global appeal, Bunny Kinney’s journey started with a hunger for more. Carly Scott
