You’ve been embraced by the fashion community in the past six months or so, by brands like Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton. As a woman of color, has being embraced by that industry brought any struggles or issues of tokenism with it?

I think you could ask that question to any person of color who’s visible, and if they were honest, and didn't think that they were going to lose opportunities by speaking on it, they would definitely answer yes, almost every time.

I have thought extensively about whiteness in the fashion world, or [the] white establishment really. Black culture is constantly being capitalized off of, there are actually very few black people in that context. I have been standing on the outside, trying to think about how I would fuck that shit up. But also, I have four or five friends of color [in the fashion industry] who are smashing it.

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You’re close with Shayne Oliver of Hood By Air, for example.

Yeah. All of those alliances [with Shayne Oliver, etc] mean so much to me because of the feeling of peer activism, or activism through the thing that you actually fucking do. [You don’t] even necessarily need to comment on it so overtly, but the business decisions and the [choice of] ‘Whose faces am I using for this?’ matter so much and they change the context. You can't go to a Hood By Air show and not see people of color, and queer people of color.

Are you continuing to work with Arca on the new album? How’s your relationship with him evolved over the years?

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He's definitely on the next record. [Our relationship] is beautiful. I talk about it all the time, I talk my boyfriend’s head off about it actually. It's like super electric; you don't have to say a lot of stuff. When we're making music we are very much like having an extraordinary time. It's exhilarating. His freedom to explore the things that he knows are part of him really makes me feel like I can do the same. It’s the same with Shayne. They are doing their thing so fucking hard, it just makes me wanna do my shit harder so that you know we're all bad-ass motherfucking people. That's the thing that I never want stop. You’re not reinventing necessarily but it's like, 'Well, did you know about this part of myself?’