A couple of weeks ago, the fashion designer Ben Cho passed away, at the age of forty. He never became world famous, much to the surprise of anyone who encountered his whimsical, avant-garde approach to clothing. His models often looked as if they had works of art growing on them. A dress in progress featured a pair of wooden hands working a set of knitting needles around the model’s neckline. Another featured a tasseled belt that, upon closer inspection, appeared to be a thick braid of hair. There were sleeves fringed with dangling keys. Perhaps his most famous piece was an enormous faux-fur polar-bear coat that Lady Gaga wore in the video for “Bad Romance.” It looked as though she were wearing an enormous, fluffy rug, with the bear’s head dragging behind, snarling at anyone on their trail.

Ben’s pieces were expensive, labor-intensive, and impossible to mass-produce. They prompted, in me, feelings of astonishment and futility: How is it that someone could conjure and execute these radical visions and yet I can’t even offer a basic description of them in words? I never understood how they fit into the broader continuum of high fashion; I’m obsessive about many forms of creative expression, but, when it comes to fashion, I simply like what I like, and have never had the inclination to range deeper and discover antecedents, parallel formations, or other artists whose work I might dig.

I followed Ben’s work because we went to school together in the early nineties, in San Jose, California. He was a year ahead of me. We both played cello in the orchestra, and I remember the way he would drape his body over the instrument, like he was protecting it, bowing it passionately, almost theatrically, even though he wasn’t particularly good. I remember that his mom was an opera singer; everyone else’s parents seemed to be engineers or scientists. I remember wondering why his gym uniform didn’t hang awkwardly on his body. I remember the way he danced wildly at school functions while the rest of us just stood in a circle and tried not to look at each other. He loved a lot of the same bands that I loved, but with a kind of knowledge and devotion that I couldn’t quite grasp. I remember peering across the row in French class at his notebook and admiring his handwriting. He was a sweet, singular person, one of those individuals who arrives in your life at a moment that you don’t yet recognize as formative, and leaves a lasting mark on your sense of taste, of self-esteem, of what’s possible. He was, in the parlance of high school, no poseur.

During his senior year, Ben was voted our high school’s Homecoming King. I remember finding this strangely exciting—like whatever I thought was happening to American culture at large, with the rise of alternative sounds and fashions, had begun taking root at our ho-hum school. It was my first exposure to the potentially gleeful whims of a democratic mob, of the power that nerds, outcasts, and children of immigrants might wield when uniting around a common cause. Our school was conservative in the way that many high schools, especially suburban ones, are conservative—which is to say that it was pretty boring. Mostly this meant that the social imagination was defined by the campus: sanctioned clubs, team sports, class offices. The world beyond seemed very far away.

But then Ben won the popularity contest. There were whispered gripes, but I thought it was unbelievably cool that the student body would celebrate someone so radical—and openly gay—at the halftime of a football game. And the next year, I somehow ended up on the Homecoming Court, as he had—a quasi-protest vote, I think, that took on a life of its own. I was nowhere near as interesting or as visible as Ben, but I suppose there were unintended benefits to years of making mixtapes and zines for my friends. By then, Ben had already moved to New York, to attend something called Parsons. But, hewing to tradition, he came back to the Bay Area for the big game. We were all dressed in generic, boxy tuxedos and poofy prom dresses, hanging out at someone’s house before the halftime ceremony. Ben pulled up in a sports car, wearing a leopard-print blazer. His hair was platinum blond. He contained more energy than the dozen of us combined. He made whatever awaited us after high school seem like the most thrilling, yet distant, thing ever.

When you write about the arts for a living, you’re often tasked with describing the importance and everlasting legacy of people who have recently died, people you only knew through their work: the poet who doomed you to a life of fatalism; the actor whose sense of mystery became an ideal for how to be in the world; the writer whose footsteps you wanted to follow in. More often than not, what is being mourned is that spark of discovery, the long-ago feeling of having been inspired in the first place. All the bad stuff—personal sins, flaws, nasty tempers—gets folded into the messiness of genius; genius becomes someone’s sole reason for having been. It’s harder to think of people you knew in these terms, to pinpoint the arc and trajectory of their lives, because to you they are ordinary people whose imperfections didn’t feed into some grander narrative of struggle. They were just bad at cello, so-so at French, riddled with angst. Yet maybe these barely remembered people who pass through your life, temporarily reshaping your language and imagination, cast more of an influence on you than the idols who have hung on your walls.

Ben came to represent a node, a connector, a ubiquitous face at all the parties, back when Manhattan still felt like the capital of the world. To many, he became as well known for the parties he threw with his friends as for his designs, especially the all-Smiths party he and Brian DeGraw (from the band Gang Gang Dance) oversaw for many years. The Times, earlier this month, published a piece about Ben headlined “DEATH OF A DOWNTOWN ICON,” which speculated that years of addiction may have been to blame for his death. I’ve devoured all the reporting on Ben’s death, just as I often looked him up on the Internet over the years since graduation. Lately I’ve stayed up at night reading Facebook posts from high-school friends about Ben’s capacity to bring light to our teen-age lives, and I’ve compared those glimpses to those shared by people who knew him in his twenties and thirties. The last time I talked to him was more than two decades ago, at halftime of the Homecoming game; he seemed as amused as I was that he was putting a crown on top of my head.

I never looked him up when I moved to the East Coast, mostly because I figured he couldn’t possibly remember me. He was friends with people I read about in magazines, I figured. I was probably wrong. Although he had found his tribe in New York, I always heard that he never forgot where he had come from, and that he would treat anyone from San Jose who ended up in the city to a hug and an epic night out. Though we never spoke after that halftime ceremony, I saw him one last time in the mid-aughts, from across the room at Misshapes, a downtown dance party where he and his friends were regulars. Every song reminded me of high school, a time when many of the people at this party, there to dance and to be seen, had been toddlers. He glanced toward me and gave a curious, knowing look, but the momentum of the dance floor between us took us in different directions.