Dylan, the 11-year-old who designs T-shirts for Hollywood stars

He’s only 11 years old, but Dylan — who prefers not to have his last name used — remains busy, even during the summer. “Working on something cool for Harris Dickinson,” he wrote on August 13 in one of his latest posts on Instagram, an account his parents still manage, in which he appears at a table full of marker pens, designing a T-shirt. The star of Babygirl will have the honor of wearing one of the exclusive pieces from Dylan’s T-Shirt Club, the brand under which this young entrepreneur presents his original designs.

“I started in 2019, when I was six years old. My grandmother, who lives in England, came to visit me in Los Angeles that summer. She brought a pack of fabric markers, and I tried them on a white T-shirt for fun. I loved it so much that I made another one, and then another. I’m almost 12 now, and I just finished shirt number 322,” Dylan explains to EL PAÍS from the Californian city.

He has those 322 T-shirts numbered and displayed on his website, where he lists the recipients of each one. “For me,” he writes on the first three, bearing colorful drawings of faces with sharp teeth or gnomes on skateboards. The surprise comes on the fourth design: “For Elle Fanning,” he writes on a T-shirt with a drawing of an extravagant face with fangs and eyelashes. “The first person who took an interest in my work was the actress Elle Fanning. She’s a good friend of our family and a client of my mother [the stylist Samantha McMillen]. She’s been an incredible friend and has supported my work from day one,” he says casually, as if talking about any one of his school friends.

The actress from Maleficent and A Complete Unknown was the first celebrity to see Dylan’s potential as a designer, and six years later, she became the first to showcase it on a red carpet. She did so at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where she appeared in a white T-shirt with the phrase “Joachim Trier Summer,” the result of an exclusive collaboration between Dylan and the singer and producer Neon. The phrase alludes to the trend dubbed “Brat Summer” by singer Charli XCX in reference to her album and the attitude it exudes. Fanning decided to reinterpret it with a 1970s vibe, alluding to director Joachim Trier of Sentimental Value, the new film starring her and Renate Reinsve (for whom Dylan created another T-shirt with the same message).

Elle Fanning already has three Dylan’s T-Shirt Club tees (numbers 4, 120, and 316), but many, many celebrities have wanted to get their own: Brie Larson, Mark Wahlberg, Pharrell Williams, Josh Brolin, and Jamie Lee Curtis are just a few. “Once I have someone in mind to make a T-shirt for, or someone contacts me to create something for them, I spend some time thinking about what the ideal image would be for the shirt. An image that’s cool and also fits their personality. Sometimes I make some sketches in a notebook before starting on the T-shirt,” says the young British designer based in Los Angeles.

One of the four that Larson owns, for example, features a drawing of a giant monster in the shape of a Croc shoe, where the holes are the eyes and the space for the foot are the jaws. “The Croc Monster,” it says on top.

Josh Brolin has two, one inspired by the film Dune — in which he plays Gurney Halleck — and another that reads “King of California” and features a giant monster with a crown in front of a palm tree.

Dylan also collaborated with Michelle Pfeiffer in 2023 to create a limited series of T-shirts inspired by the bottles used in the actress’s fragrance brand, Henry Rose. “It feels good when someone, famous or not, asks me to create a T-shirt for them. I’m really grateful that people trust me to create something cool for them,” he confesses.

Among all these customers, there are also many unknown names of friends and many T-shirts “for mom,” “for dad,” “for grandpa,” or “for grandma.” Dylan confirms that, for now, the original items are not for sale.

“I’ve given almost all of them away. Sometimes, people I know order one from me and send me something in return. This could change in the future, and I’ll find a way to sell some original T-shirts to the general public,” he says. In fact, on September 12, he launched the first Dylan’s T-Shirt Club merchandise product on his website: a limited edition run of 60 black caps with the brand name written on them in white letters. “I also want to release a limited edition of screen-printed T-shirts soon,” he says.

Meanwhile, he’s working on two T-shirts “for two incredible friends” and then plans to do something for the Paul Walker Foundation — founded by the late actor’s daughter — “as a charity collaboration.” He says he can’t single out any celebrity in particular for whom he’s been excited to work — “I’m very grateful to all of them,” he insists — and he hasn’t turned down any requests.

But he does have three people in mind he’d like to commission a T-shirt: “Eminem, Ice Cube, or Snoop Dogg wearing them would be incredible.” The three rappers share another of Dylan’s great passions. “I love producing beats and rap music on my iMac at home,” he says. He combines all of this with his studies and also finds time to practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu and muay thai, as well as playing basketball and video games. “And I love building with Lego,” he adds.

It’s still too early to determine whether the success of Dylan’s T-Shirt Club is due precisely to the fact that they are created by a child, to his mother’s connections in Hollywood — her styling company’s clients include stars like Chris Hemsworth, Ana de Armas, and Jodie Foster, among many others — or whether its founder is truly a diamond in the rough who’s just getting started. “I love doing this and I plan to keep doing it,” he says. “I still don’t know what I want to be in the future, but at some point it would be great to have a T-shirt shop selling my creations, T-shirt workshops inside, and records for sale.”

Growing up surrounded by fashion, among racks full of clothes, Dylan doesn’t consider designing T-shirts “a job,” but after literally half a lifetime doing it, he realizes it’s no longer just a hobby. “It’s halfway there. By that, I mean I make a lot of them as gifts, but I also collaborate with brands and people. That’s more the work side of things,” he explains. “But it’s still a lot of fun!”

Dylan entertains himself by painting, unleashing his creativity, like any child. The difference is that, along the way, he rubs shoulders with Hollywood stars he now calls “friends,” celebrities he feels comfortable around, but whose exposure he doesn’t envy. “I’m pretty discreet and like to do things more in the background,” he admits. His unique T-shirts are already attracting attention.

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