So naturally, as he seemed to be reaching a peak, Adam Kimmel canceled his Spring-Summer 2013 collection and walked away from the business that he built after seven years of seemingly unhindered success.

Adam Kimmel in 2011 Victor Boyko/Getty Images

“I just felt this pressure,” Kimmel told me one morning this fall over eggs at the restaurant inside the Carlyle Hotel. “The company was growing. It was growing fast. The last two years it was doubling in revenue each year. So it was like, I could become a slave to this thing.”

Our interview is Kimmel’s first since he released a statement in June of 2012 announcing that he would be taking a one-year hiatus. It read, in part: “I look forward to utilizing this next year to experiment and learn, and channel what I find into new concepts, designs and projects. I believe this is how designers become better stewards to their work.”

Kimmel did not return to fashion. Not after a year, not ever. But in a way he did remain a good steward to his work. Just not in the way he might have anticipated when he wrote that. In the years since he disappeared, I never stopped hearing his name. First as a sort of rite of passage around industry people, proof that you’d been around long enough to remember. Then I started hearing whispers that some menswear so-and-sos were hunting for archival Adam Kimmel pieces on eBay, message boards, and Yahoo! Japan auctions. And recently, again and again over the past year, I heard his name mentioned along with the phrase “ahead of his time.”

I was dying to know what happened. Why did he stop? Where did he go? What has he been doing since? In New York, successful, ambitious people don’t just quit. They burn out spectacularly. And in fashion, when you’re starting to have commercial success, critical admiration, and a seemingly endless reserve of creativity, you don’t just walk away. Sure, Helmut Lang famously stepped away at his peak—but he’d been at the top of his game for almost 20 years. Kimmel was just getting going.

Naturally, I assumed that whatever reason Kimmel had for making such a radical decision must have been huge, strange, and intense—maybe even scary or life threatening.

But here’s how Kimmel remembers it: “I was just like, ‘I want to be a good husband, I want to be a good dad. I want to take a year off, I want to work on that [other thing], and if this is the thing that’s meant to be, great, I’ll come back.’” Kimmel told me. “But I had a lot of questions. I had a lot I wanted to work on as a human being.”

Waris Ahluwalia in Adam Kimmel’s Spring-Summer 2006 lookbook Michael Pitt Casey and Van Neistat

Rita Ackermann in Adam Kimmel’s Fall-Winter 2007 lookbook Jack Pierson Dan Colen

In hindsight, Kimmel’s decision to stop when he did seems ill-advised—or at the very least ill-timed. Immediately after he stepped away, cool, independent menswear suddenly found a much bigger audience, taking a significant place in the broader culture for the first time ever. In 2012, Instagram was approaching its first 100 million users, Mr. Porter and the new world of e-commerce were finding their audiences, and the conversation around men’s style was changing as the #menswear internet cracked the system open, demystifying the fashion establishment and lowering the barrier for entry. Highly motivated amateurs were infiltrating fashion from every angle, many of them heavily influenced by Kimmel’s meticulous but unfussy work. In fact, Kimmel’s entire career in fashion came and went before people started referring to themselves as influencers. In a world where Virgil Abloh is Virgil Abloh, Kimmel, who had a seven year head start, would surely be huge by now.