I've never considered Supreme to be a fashion company, or myself a designer.
The skateboarders are snobbier - their look is much cleaner than ravers'.
I'm not really concerned if people have this purist view of the New York Supreme thing. If they think opening our shop in Paris is going to harm our brand, then we can't really be that strong of a brand.
Young people - and skaters - are very, very open-minded.
As a small brand, we do it all. We don't need an investor. We would never go anywhere or do anything where we feel it would compromise what we do.
We were making clothes for that New York skater, who is a picky kind of person with good taste He may look scruffy to the outside world, but he's very sharp in the way he dresses.
I know what Stone Island means to a lot of people in England and Europe.
I still feel like we're a skate brand - it doesn't mean we can't present our stuff well. It doesn't mean that when you come in, everything has to be messy.
Ever since September 11, I've been quite conservative in what we've ordered. We've never really been supply-demand anyway.
A lot of people dismiss what we do. They think, 'Well, it's skate, so it's got to be, like, big baggy pants, cap backwards, big chain'... They don't understand that just because skating is the culture we're working in, it doesn't mean that we can't make good things.
My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music. There are always critics that don't understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion.
Oftentimes you'll see pictures from fashion shows and all the models outside the show in their real clothes are wearing brands like Supreme.
Ralph Lauren... Ralph is somebody that doesn't change with trends and has just kept it up and gotten better and better. That's what we aspire to, without getting boring.
I'm influenced a lot by Chanel and by what Karl Lagerfeld has done.
Any brand in the world wants to make desirable product. But we don't shove it down people's throats.
Fashion people are picky.
I don't really care what a designer has to say.
When I do read something about a designer it doesn't alter my thoughts about their collection when I see it in person.
Our business is as good as any high-end designer. We do good because we make good things.
We just want to grow at a reasonable pace. Supreme hasn't changed for 20 years, and that feels very simple to me.
