You don’t need an art history degree to see why the Peanuts characters resonate with KAWS. The artist, né Brian Donnelly, has made a career of character studies, creating his own version of The Simpsons, dubbed the Kimpsons, and his own lexicon of humanoid figures called Companions and Chums. Throughout this, Charles Schulz’s beloved group of backyard kids has remained a perennial touchstone in the artist’s work, one that will be celebrated with a collaborative range of T-shirts, tote bags, slippers, and stuffed toys with Uniqlo. It’s KAWS’s second project with the Japanese retailer.

“I’m into Schulz as an artist, a company, and an icon; I got into his stuff just because I liked the looseness of the line work, and I thought that it was just sort of a nice thing to bring into my paintings, even if it’s abstract and unidentifiable,” KAWS told Vogue from his Brooklyn studio. “The way I paint is very tight and very slow, but painting that looseness, even if I’m still doing the same sort of approach that takes me a month to do the painting, it just, I felt, added a nice quality to the work. That really got me into exploring it.”

KAWS’s earliest exploration of Peanuts was on a ’95 MetLife billboard in his native New Jersey. The art was simple: The name KAWS in blue paint, graffitied under Snoopy flying a prop plane, with Woodstock standing on its tail. Since then he’s included Snoopy and Woodstock in a variety of projects, including making them a centerpiece of his clothing-and-more brand OriginalFake. The Uniqlo range, dropping online Thursday evening and in Uniqlo’s stores on Friday, picks up where that left off, cracking open the sometimes reclusive cult of KAWS in the process. Earlier this month Vogue got a sneak peek into that world, inside KAWS’s studio. Here, the artist chats about the art of collaboration, getting into Instagram, and the importance of feeling like an outsider wherever you are.

What are your earliest memories of Peanuts?I think Peanuts is part of being a kid in America. Whether it’s the Great Pumpkin on Halloween or just seeing a different cartoon in the paper, it’s sort of around everywhere. My first interaction with Peanuts in my art was when I used to do all the billboards. One of the earlier ones that I really liked the most was painting over a Peanuts billboard. Later I did Peanuts stuff over at OriginalFake.