Your new collection was surprisingly preppy. Why did you go in that direction?

"This collection was based on twisting every single aspect of what I thought preppy culture was about, dissecting those ideas, and conflicting them. It’s a mix of Abercrombie, Ralph Lauren, Polo Sport, Nautica, Under Armour and then also just really gay underwear. You know the really stretchy, nasty gay fabric? It came from there. Me and Babak started looking at clothes and patterns that already exist, like a polo shirt from American Eagle. We dissected that, and made the stripes functional, and we started making stuff graphic."

How much of your inspiration comes from clicking around online?

"Not a lot. I think that if I can see it online, I cross it off. If you can google it and find it, take it off. That’s our thing. When we were coming up with ideas, I’ll google it several different times. Google every different aspect of it and if you can’t find it, you know you’re kinda onto something. When I go to China [to visit my factories], things just get so out of context, too."

I assume that not a lot of designers actually go to the factory and are part of actually developing their product. Do you think that helps your collection in the end?

"Yeah, absolutely. It’s a blessing and a curse that I don’t speak Chinese. Sometimes we’ll tell [the factories] to do something, and they’ll do it completely wrong, and that’s the best part of the process because you see these thing going wrong, and it turns into this completely different thing that actually isn’t referential. It isn’t what you thought it was supposed to be, and it starts to be completely new."

Do you work as a collective, or do you get final say?

"A lot of conversations will happen between me, Babak, and Avena, where Avena will say ‘Oh, that looks great,’ and Babak will be like, ‘I hate that.’ Majority wins. We collaborate with a lot of different people — each person that comes into the situation will add their two cents, and I really like to leave things up to interpretation and also up to the person. I never want to be like ‘I’m collaborating with you, and this is what you’re going to do.' I’ll design something and I wouldn’t even want to be around Babak and Avena during this design-editing process of what I actually want. So, I’ll design something and then I show them. It’s so strange because sometimes Babak is thinking the exact same thing. I was in a factory making a pair of pants, and I went to his house and there was a sketch on his wall, and it was the exact same pair of pants that I was drawing. We’re the same sign."