Sometimes you just want to feel that electricity of like, I'm gonna go outside today and I'm gonna get away with this.
I hesitate to talk about my style as if it's anything that I think about beyond the moment of what feels right. I certainly have not congealed this thinking into like, I am a style guy. I don't normally do these interviews talking about fashion. I know that we're heading towards this place culturally were like people who aren't necessarily always thought of as style people have become that which i think is super fun.
My style is about balance between these highly differentiating novel interesting far-out things and working in a new kind of a daily wear situation. I really am seeing what I can get away with without making people go like, Oh come on! I'm sort of committed myself to some extent to always being in that zone of something that makes people go, What? But then the fun part for me is finding a balance and then when you get away with it you want to do something else that makes someone else go. "Well now what is that?"
I got turned on to Visvim in like 2005. 2005 you'd go to Japan and your cell phone wouldn't work and that was really exciting. And you would rely on the kindness of the friends who knew other people in Japan to sort of tell you where to go. And I was walked into this Visvim by a friend of a friend, you know, like guys who really have it going on in Harajuka. And I really was into the fact that everything that Hiroki made had this one differentiating element to it pieces that have come to be associated with me are like robes. I think I've always liked the robes because it doesn't fit spiritually, when you put it, on the description of a jacket or a shirt becomes sort of like a room. Hard to explain. There's a real power to it.
You have a certain number of points you can spend on an outfit. Let's say you have ten points. Wearing a robe is an instant six-pointer. And if you're gonna wear something that's hyper bold, you're spending most your points. You better go jeans and t-shirt.
Personally I like to keep it at 10. I'm starting to go like sometimes I'm ending off like eight or nine points leaving the house. And I think that's an age thing, man. I do feel like with my age and the number of years that I've been dressing myself that I definitely have like fallen into it do's and don'ts for me personally.
So I feel like I am at the end of an era of a lot of mistakes. I feel like your 20s and your 30s should be like, Figure it out.
And then when you get in your 40s, you're like, Here's what works.
I'm like, man look at the pictures of you from your 20s in your early 30s. People are working that out. To every person in their 20s and their 30s: wear that hat!
People are like, really into shoes. I look at them as the anchor of the outfit. I lot of people see shoes as the main event. I see a shoe as a stabilizing force in an outfit. People were always doing the switcheroo on the latest, greatest shoe.
I wish more people, myself included, would just wear one thing into the ground. I wanna see repeats. I think repeats are cool. There's a thing that you won't know unless you live in something for so long that every day you put your foot in it it's just forming to your foot, to where any other shoe or boot is like wrong.
When you finally get to a point where it becomes something like somebody would describe, in your personal life, as a "John" thing to where, you're getting somewhere.
At the end of the day I'm still just a dude that buys a bunch of stuff, tries it on as soon as I get it, leaves a pile on the closet floor and works with whatever comes of that.
Just a dude that buys a bunch of clothes and has figured out his own sort of code for putting them on.
Lest anyone thinks that this has become too precious, I'm just a dude who buys a bunch of clothes. Aren't we all? We're all just people who buy a bunch of clothes. And when we put a certain combination on we feel a little bit greater than we did before.