It was a little by accident that I discovered Bob Ross—I don't know who came first, Bob Ross or Elsa Klensch. Elsa Klensch was on CNN, and she would cover fashion. It was on Saturday mornings at 7:30, so I would wake up just to watch that. I don't know if Bob Ross was on after that or whatever, but it was like, "Okay. I'm awake now. I'm not going to go back to sleep." And so I would start flipping channels, and I would land on PBS and just kind of be mesmerized. Like, "Oh! What is going on here?"

There was a very therapeutic quality, because he was soft-spoken. He was very methodical and thoughtful and organized. There was a gentleness to him. I liked the fact that everything was organized and tidy. But he also made me realize that some mistakes are okay—or how to solve a mistake. And that there's perfection in imperfection, which later I learned as wabi sabi. But he kind of just said, "It's okay. Be free. Have fun and give things a try."

Courtesy of Bob Ross, Inc. Courtesy of Bob Ross, Inc.

When you looked at him, it was a little like, "What the eff is going on?" Because of the Afro. It was the '80s and '90s—beards weren't necessarily a thing anymore. That was left behind in the '70s, but he kept his beard. And then he had the modern-day Afro—or the perm, I should say. But the rest of his style was really classic. It was always a chambray shirt or a button-down woven shirt. Maybe a turtleneck, which was such an old-school detail, to wear it underneath a woven shirt. And then, you know, everything tucked into his trousers or jeans, and that belt. That was a bit of a timeless look from the neck down.

There’s a specific time in one's life where one kind of arrives or feels like, "Hey, I found myself." And you could tell that his revelation of himself was around the late '70s: Beards, O-ring belts, and aviator glasses were a thing. He wasn't doing anything that was fashion. He wasn't doing any of the late-'80s and '90s kind of attire. He wasn't wearing a red leather moto jacket, you know?