"I'm in way deeper than $85 now."

Yeah, you end up going, There's gotta be something else out there. But what was cool about the sneaker thing is it got people into physical product.

Right. Sneakers are the gateway. So how much of that stuff do you still have?

I've given a lot of stuff away. I speak for a lot of former sneakerheads who are like, "I can't start an eBay company to sell sneakers that are $25." So you end up giving them to people who are your size. There are a couple of really cool things that I still have. Anything that's a collab: Futura has done it, Kaws has done it. Those things are interesting to hold onto. All of the Hiroshi Fujiwara Fragment stuff; anything that has that Harajuku vibe I think I've held on to. But there was a time when they were coming out with a bunch of different colorways and naming it after what the colors represented. When you start getting into Air Max '95 Bacon and Eggs, you're like... Alright.

But it got me, and it got everyone I know, into the idea of the pursuit of physical product. Like, how many Drake records are there? The answer is as many as you want. In the face of this digital turnout of things, you go, "I want to have something that not everybody has. I want something that differentiates me."

Do you currently collect anything that you can't wear?

You know, there are certain things that I have in my collection that I would like to wear—I mean in my mind's eye, where I'm a lot of things that I can't be in real life. And there have probably been times where I've gone too far into the ambition of it rather than what the authentic vibe should be.

Oh, do you mean wearing something that you can't quite pull off?

Yeah. So I have a lot of old robes. A lot of Tibetan robes, and it'll end up in People magazine that I was wearing a bathrobe. And it's like, "Well, actually it's a totally hand-painted, natural dye... It's made with real indigo and crushed up ladybugs!" So yeah, sometimes you'll buy something because there's something that strikes you about it, and you'll hang it up and you'll go, "I don't know how yet, but someday..." And either times change or you see—this is very important, and I'm not afraid to admit this—you see someone else you look up to contextualize it in a way that allows you to find your way into wearing it. All of fashion is completely, one-thousand-percent context-based.

Can you give an example?

Yeah, absolutely. If you go to Japan—Japan has these guys, some of them are designers, some of them are artists, and you see how they implement it, and what their point of reference is. I've never stolen somebody's fashion, but I've stolen people's points of reference.

That's all we ever do.

Here's a case in point: If your only reference to baggy jeans is Marky Mark or Kris Kross, then you won't want to wear them. But if your reference is like miners from the '40s—you look at a picture of people who were working around World War II and they're using rope to hold their jeans on because they didn't have a bunch of sizes back then—then you get into workwear. If that's your point of reference and you have a good song playing? That might just fuse into your brain.

So that's all it is for me. It's so much fun to collect points of reference, and pay homage or tribute to them, or bite a little bit. Who cares? You're allowed to bite, you know? What took me years to figure out is how to tailor it—no pun intended—to who I am, so you're not just walking around, like, displaying clothes on yourself.