He recalls frantically printing catalogs at Kinko’s. He points out that the first, very small Visvim store—open for one year before relocating to that basement I couldn’t find—was located on a street where rents were cheap across from an elementary school (this has since dramatically changed—that site is now a Bathing Ape flagship surrounded by luxury stores). “That was the best I could do, but it was still cool,” he assures me.

Hiroki repeatedly connects this LA store to those early, scrappier days. Visvim Exposition was the surprising culmination of a sudden and conspicuous flurry of retail activity for Visvim across the US—first an outpost in a one-story house in Santa Fe, then a brief pop-up on a side-street in Tribeca, then a modest shop in a residential corner of Brentwood, projects Hiroki deems more “personal.” He tells me he had actually been looking for a space for something big for years, first in New York, and when that fell through, in Los Angeles. “I think LA downtown is still relatively… like rents are not so expensive and an independent company like us, we can do something interesting,” Hiroki says. “It’s not so much pressure on the numbers. I thought ‘let’s just do something fun just like we did 15 years ago in Japan.’” Like that Tokyo store, Visvim Exposition is located along a drag of the city that, for at least several blocks in every direction, completely lacks any peer retail presence of meaning.

“A big space like this in New York, I can’t afford it. And I want to do something interesting. That’s my honest opinion.”

Of course, the irony is that there is very little about Visvim that is ever affordable. Visvim Exposition, an expansive room filled with expensive things displayed next to even more expensive things, is no exception. The store is in the Bradbury Building, one of LA’s oldest and most iconic buildings. Contractors needed to remove the store’s facade in order to deliver what are, essentially, decorations: a vintage camping trailer and a hot air balloon-sized cho-chin paper lantern, shipped intact from Japan. The shop is outfitted with a museum’s worth of wildly expensive furniture by American mid-century designer George Nakashima, who himself was a sort of proto-Hiroki, but in reverse (“George Nakashima is someone I respect and love and am into. We use his furniture at home, and in it I can see a lot of Japanese influence, but in America,” he tells me). There is a turntable that broadcasts old Americana like Chet Baker and Benny Goodman through vintage Patrician 800 speaker cabinets. It’s the first background music ever in a Visvim store, and characteristically it’s been percolating for years—Hiroki actually named a pair of dress shoes after these speakers almost ten years ago. “I really liked to listen to vinyl records on these speakers, and thought we could do something fun with them,” he tells me wistfully.

Just a few feet from Hiroki is the pièce de résistance: a gargantuan pair of FBT sneakers, conservatively size 100. They are a kitschy touch of whimsy, complete with a bench in the insole so Hiroki can sit in each like a go-cart. But they represent very real craftsmanship—they were shaped from vegetable tanned suede hides using actual enormous shoe lasts, and have honest-to-God Vibram soles. Just for calibration, FBTs for non-giants cost $700.

All that is to say that when most people use the word “afford”, it is an implied downgrade. There is some kind of central compromise being made. For Hiroki, on the other hand, “afford” means finding a way to accomplish everything without compromising his vision whatsoever. Instead, he’ll compromise on, even deliberately avoid, things most businesses value most critically: for the stores, it’s location; for the product, it’s stuff like scale, efficiency, marketing, and, ultimately, price. “Our goal is we want to keep making the best things we can,” he says, “so that’s what we do.”

It has worked. Hiroki’s “if I make it, they will come” philosophy hasn’t just made him a fashion cult figure; he’s practically a fashion cult leader. Though its limited product runs and lofty prices mean Visvim doesn’t always connect, when it does, it can cause a unique obsession. If you visit any Visvim store for any appreciable amount of time—in Tokyo, in Kanazawa, in Kyoto, in Santa Fe—you are sure to encounter worshippers making international pilgrimages to genuflect at Visvim’s altar. For some people, it practically has the irresistible gravity of a dying star. “There are people out there who literally buy every single thing that Visvim makes. They collect it. It is a passion of theirs,” Josh Peskowitz says. “And I can’t tell you that many clothing brands that have that same fanaticism from such a broad demographic.”

Hiroki, too, clearly loves his product. Anyone who knows Hiroki remotely knows that he gets high exclusively off of his own supply—aside from some occasional vintage pieces, Visvim is all he wears. For a company that does essentially no advertising, Hiroki’s mind-blowing outfits are both Visvim’s best marketing, and for me at least, a significant hurdle for the imagination: Hiroki shows the optimal way to wear, say, a robe made from tree bark, and I immediately understand I could never look as cool in it.