Dare to find beauty in the struggle - Luke Carson

0:10The way I am, the way I think, what attracts me, what doesn't attract me. A big thing that he always teaches is trusting your intuition, your gut. He never had schooling. There were no rules to break. It just is what made sense to him and communicated. And, you know, as you know, it came with a lot of hate mail in the early days. He came with a lot of what is this crap, but he never second-guessed himself. And I think that's an approach that I've always found useful for my life, is trusting my gut. Take that risky trip without knowing where you're going. Buy those jeans that you found in Japan, even though they're a little out of budget because you really believe in the brand and the person making them.

0:50Those are smaller decisions, but again, that intuition aspect.

0:58welcome to the daring creativity podcast a show about daring to forever explore creativity that isn't about chasing shiny perfection it's about showing up with all your doubts and imperfections and making them count it's about becoming more of who you already are my name is radim malinich i'm a designer author and eternally curious human being i am talking to a broad range of guests who share their stories of small actions that sparked lifetime discoveries, taking one step towards the thing that made them feel most alive. Let me begin this episode with a question. Are you ready to discover what happens when you dare to create?

1:47Today I'm speaking with Luke Carson, a creative producer and a brand strategist who represents his father, legendary graphic designer David Carson, while forging his own path at the intersection of design, sport and culture. His work involves curating authentic brand partnerships that always prioritize genuine creative connection over commercial convenience. In this conversation, Luke discusses how surviving Hodgkin's life former at 18 taught him how to find beauty in struggle and how basketball courts became his therapy and community. He also opens up about the challenge of working with family while maintaining creative independence, why he chooses travel experiences over the theory of possession and how his New York upbringing shaped his instinct for what makes culturally relevant collaborations work.

2:36It's my pleasure to share with you my conversation with Luke Carson.

2:43Hey Luke, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? doing well thank you so much ron thanks for having me i'm really excited to be here likewise i think we'll have a lot to unpack today because of what you do who you are where you grow up your short career so far is already packed with so many things that we can share with my listeners but for those who may have never heard of luke carson how would you introduce yourself and what you do yeah definitely thanks again for having me it means a lot it has been a short career thus far just getting started originally actually studied film at chapman university in southern california and actually one of those courses that i took towards the end of my senior year was called agents and managers and we got to learn and shadow a bunch of agents and managers and more specifically the hollywood scene from a movie from actors and directors you name it and representing those specific talents but it really struck a chord with me and then specifically i was always really fascinated with my upbringing around not only New York City, growing up here in Manhattan, playing basketball at a high level.

3:49I played literally all throughout my life, played at the collegiate level for a little bit as well. And it's still a big part of my day-to-day, even as of last night, I was playing up in my headquarters. It's a big part of my routine, and it's opened a lot of doors up for me in terms of the people I've met. And so actually from that course in itself, the first gig that I landed out of school was to work for CAA, the talent agency, to potentially become like a basketball agent down the road. But it didn't really make a lot of sense out of school because I was self-sufficient, didn't have a ton of money in the bank account.

4:23And I don't know how much you know about the talent agency role, but when you're entry level, they call it the mailroom, and there's really no money to be had. And it's an absolute grind for years before you can even see a penny. and I don't have the luxury or I didn't have the luxury of just like stepping into a trust fund or you know having endless money to just hit my bank account the second I graduated and rent in LA is expensive so I just figured out other ways to build a more steady income and then in 2022 December I want to say is when I approached my father David Carson the legendary designer to come on board and help him with special collaborations, brand partnerships.

5:05Ideally, get him into arts and residency programs, which we're doing a lot of this fall and early next year. Because again, he sees himself more of a fine artist, as do a lot of his fans. And so that's really fun avenue. And so that was kind of my schooling and my training from a career perspective was learning how to navigate a father-son relationship and also just being a fan of the work and having a good understanding of culturally what would be a good fit at that point in early 2023 all the way up until now and moving forward in 2026 just culturally having a good pulse on the brands and just people that make sense for his career so that's been a really fun challenge and I think is unique to my upbringing specifically growing up in New York City and then walking the spine line of basketball fashion and just growing up around artists my whole family is full of special artists and graphic designers so this is fascinating i got my first question and i want to know about basketball what was it like the love for the game at what point did you know i'm going to be shooting hoops for quite a while i have videos actually just pulled one up pretty recently and posted across my instagram but just me when i was about four or five years old we'd actually just relocated outside of new york when 9 11 happened and we moved to a place called isla Palms, which is in South Carolina and outside of Charleston specifically.

6:27So my mom was down there, my dad was down there, my sister and I were down there. And I found this amazing footage of me playing back then, which was definitely an early sign that I was pretty hooked. But I do remember that Eureka moment. I think it was pretty evident by fourth or fifth grade that I clearly could play thanks to my dad. He put me in the LeBron James camp. So I played at the LeBron James camp and won best shooter award as a 10 year old which was pretty ridiculous and then the next year at 11 I won the MVP of the camp for my age bracket which was like a two-year age bracket and so that's where things started to really click I think there was one other story where I won an MVP at a camp in South Carolina a few years earlier than that when I was probably eight or eight or nine and my dad was absolutely stunned because he didn't expect me to get an award because all the names had been written off and he didn't think that MVP was even left he just forgot about it and then he was like wait a minute my son's about to win this so that was a cool first interaction too but a long-winded answer to say actually sixth grade so let's say when I was about 12 years old is when I decided to drop track and field I played one year football as a sixth grader dropped everything that was not basketball and just pursued that full time so yeah that's a big part of it I always say I do have the habit of asking people about their beginnings about their families and as you said your dad is David Carson and we spent most of this conversation so far talking about your basketball and mostly your track and field and all of that stuff because obviously you grow up around someone who's been such a prolific and important person in the graphic design history of this of this planet really what was your way of being inspired by this did you ever feel the pull from a younger age into being sort of working into exploring creativity because it's so far it sounds more like you spend more time running around getting sweaty and rubbing hooves yeah definitely i think i've always been the curious one i've always admired film photography i've been shooting on a contact c2 for quite a while i think my general curiosity as a youth bled into my career and my day today now and it's really interesting at my age of 27 spending time with my dad or spending time with my mom and I noticed the same tendencies that we all have when it comes to signage on the streets typography on a side of a building or a jersey or for an album cover and just that childlike curiosity is like always been within me I've always liked specific teams from a very early aged because of their jersey design, the color palettes, and things of that sort.

9:06And I think that's always stood out to me. I think I have old Instagram accounts that I made for myself of just numbers, typography of numbers that I liked throughout New York City signage, whether that's on a garbage can or on someone's front door. So I think it's just always been in tandem and growing up in New York, especially with my mom specifically too. I mean, she has such a good eye. She's more of an iPhone photographer day to day, but she's just always going above and beyond to take that quick shot. Very abstract image of a basketball dribbling, people interacting in New York City. I mean, she just always caught such raw footage of our life growing up in New York that I think it just was ingrained in my DNA.

9:52You mentioned your mom. What does she do? Is she creative? Yeah, she's a draft designer. She actually submitted two different types of fonts that were used in ray gun and beach culture when she was still a university student so she designed her own fonts that she made one of one when she was in her early 20s and just off a whim sent them to my father without expecting to ever hear back and he went on to use both fonts and i'm not i've told my head i won't know the name of the two but i just received a magazine and it's called IdeaMag. And David did the cover of IdeaMag. It's a famous Japanese mag from the late 90s.

10:31And there's an entire spread of my mom's portfolio in it and a feature about her career and how she was recognized by AIGA 30 under 30 as a craft designer. So her first gig out of school, after she dropped out of CalArts, she was there for her master's program. But because of a pretty severe earthquake, she ended up dropping her master's program and just started immediately working for David Carson Design in her mid-20s. Her I guess graduating class if you will were famous designers and artists like Jeff McBride a dear friend of hers to this day and so she came from quite a class from that era and again those two type those two fonts that she designed ended up in the most influential magazine of the time so she's a great designer and I think one of my favorite quotes from And my dad, even though they split at a young age, he always said she was the best designer he's ever worked with.

11:25So that's a really cool token for her, of course. That's a real compliment. I mean, you're thinking about what you've been describing. It's just, we've got a lot of film, we've got New York, we've got photography. And I'm like, okay, so what is the love story we actually drawing here? And yeah, it all started with a font. It was like, how do you make two graphic designers get together? Well, design a font, and from designing a font, you never know where it might take you. Because that's really interesting. So growing up in New York, you mentioned that you guys moved out after 9-11, a lot of the life in New York for the medium of film.

11:58Obviously, we did see a lot of movies, we see lots of different facets of New York and kind of stories. What was it like to live through it, especially through such an important time of American history? Yeah, I was just about to turn four years old. So I was on the younger side. However, ever since that moment, I even remember in my fifth grade courses, art classes that I was drawing Twin Towers and contributing it to a lot of my portfolio work throughout middle school and even high school. For some reason, I just had this strong, strong obsession with New York. I think that's a really unique perspective of New York City in general is that I'm not the most patriot person when it comes to America and the politics and the current standing that we're in.

12:40However, I'm a very, very proud New Yorker and I'm hopeful that we can kind of push the needle and change the course of our country's legacy, if you will, in the 2025, 2026 lens. So I do think to answer your question, like from a very early age, I felt this really strong sense of unity and pride to be from New York, to have come from that situation at hand. The film, there's insane photos that my mom took of me on our roof in the West Village, overlooking Twin Towers days before the event. And then she has video footage of the aftermath or while it was currently happening. And she can relive those stories very well.

13:22And so that's also kind of part of the family history in some capacity. And there's no real way of knowing or telling, but it is really interesting because there is no genetical connection to my cancer diagnosis. As I had mentioned earlier, Hodgkin's lymphoma, It's very possible that it was because of 9-11, because the black smoke was in our apartment so deeply. And I have family friends who have actually won court cases in 9-11 nonprofits in terms of getting some sort of compensation because there was no other linkage to their diagnosis. So I feel a real strong sense of connection to that catastrophic moment, you know.

14:01that sounds like a tragedy within the tragedy because yeah before we started recording i asked you about your cancers and i wanted to know if it's okay to talk about it because you mentioned it was your 18th birthday which wasn't exactly the celebration that you wanted yeah it was actually the halloween and then my birthday was about two months later so i would have turned 19 i remember i had chemo i had my third round of chemo on my birthday when i was 19 years old so that's yeah Yeah, not the best way to celebrate. But I also look back at that time, and I'm almost in a strange way indebted to it.

14:36It taught me a lot that school, friendships, girlfriends, family haven't been able to teach me. And it's just a sense of, I mean, of course they have in some capacity, but there's another underlying impact that that experience had with life and death, illness, quite literally being as pale as you can imagine. no eyebrows, no eyelashes, bald head, you know, just the whole nine where you're just completely, you look like a cancer patient. And to see that and to look in the mirror at 18, 19, oh my gosh, I don't wish that upon anyone. And so I did find myself losing my grip, even when the sites or I guess the goals were near and clear in terms of my cancer cure date was around the corner, which later became May 1st, 2017, after five rounds of chemo and 21 days of radiation.

15:25But even with that sight in mind, it became obviously a very daunting experience once I had a little bit of time on my hands to just take a step back. And so one of the things that I did was that I worked with a tutor and improved my college testing scores in order to get into Dream University. And I improved my score by over 400 points, which then ultimately got me into my dream film school. As I mentioned a bit earlier, the third in the country, just behind NYU and USC. Found some beauty in the struggle, which has absolutely been a consistent life lesson to this day is if you're still chugging, you're still, there's still life to be had.

16:04There's something there for you. You just got to believe and you got to focus on the small wind day to day when you've lost your way a bit, you know? And so there's endless lessons from it. And I'm very, very proud of that experience. Very open talking about it. I've spoken to cancer patients and families at large scale in front of several hundred people here at NYU because I leaned on people like myself when I was in that position to get real insight to get real advice because it was almost impossible to get a real connection with someone who hadn't walked that walk before. You mentioned you were losing your grip but I didn't expect that in your next breath you would just say well I was working with a cheetah to improve my scores by 400 points and therefore do this because life changes you got your diagnosis your life as you knew it it was always going to change forever and would you remember being that sort of guiding light even though obviously you get yourself in the mirror and go okay this is not the person i remember yeah a few months ago how did you give yourself that view on things that you can make it you can find positivity in the darkness yeah definitely i think it's funny it comes down to a couple of things number one the relationships i have i realized how lucky i am and was then to have deep deep friendships relationships another pro of New York City especially if you're a bit of an extroverted person and you're going to meet a lot of people quickly and a lot of people that care deeply too it's a very passionate place to grow up and so I was even though a lot of my friends were away at their first year of school or in college I mean or their second year in university I had a dear friend who I went to high school with who was just then becoming a senior in high school so he was still based in New York City.

17:45And he's still to this day, a close friend of mine, Jacob. And Jacob is a major influence on me as he became the youngest director level music executive at the age of 25, which is ridiculous. And he's just turning 27. And then he works at Sony. And so, yeah, he was just such a major influence. And then obviously people like my mother, even though she had to work and everyone in the family, of course, you know, so just leaning on those relationships. But then what I wanted to say also that we talked about earlier was basketball. Jacob, he wanted to distract me in any way possible. So he would get me to Knicks games.

18:22We would play NBA 2K, the video game to like simulate our favorite players. Or he would quite literally force me in the best way possible to come to his practice, aka my old high school, where I graduated the year prior. And he forced me to at least participate and watch the practice and rebound and pass the ball to people, even though I was quite literally had a beanie on and not one strand of hair anywhere in my body. And so he wanted me to just be there. And it kind of comes back to the impact basketball has had on my outlook on life. And to this day, it's really interesting. Whenever I've been in a rut, I zoom out.

19:01I talk to a therapist and I realize I'm not playing basketball as much as I like to. And then once I get that back into swings, it's really interesting. Everything starts to click. and that's kind of been the case for the last two or three years playing a ton. I like when you said that if you're a bit extroverted, you get lots of friends in New York. I spoke to people like Talia Cotton on this podcast, and I was asked about the New York confidence when you're surrounded by these type of people. Is it something that you grow up here? It's something you need to learn, and I think it's just that the surroundings, it rubs onto you and just gives you that feeling that, as you're talking about your friend Jacob, it's so inspiring just to have someone to really root for you and just said, hey, look, we're going to get you through this.

19:42This is going to happen. Definitely. It's just pridefulness and all. It's one of the reasons why I have friends always ask me or people I've dated, they're like, are you going to leave New York ever? And I can't. I can leave for months at a time. I did Japan for a month. I went to Vietnam the year prior for a month. I travel pretty much every month. I'm really thankful for that experience. I just love, love, love to travel, put myself in new positions. However, New York City's always got to be home base. I can't get away from it. It always pulls me back. I find something new each week. It adds an extra chip on your shoulder because if you can make it here, it's really cliche, but you can make it anywhere.

20:20Because it is so freaking expensive here, it is tiring at times. But then you find out how to navigate it and then it becomes a very almost peaceful place. I remember coming back from Tokyo and Japan to hear sirens and people screaming and craziness. It was very comforting in a way, which I didn't expect because Japan was the quietest place I've ever been to.

20:44Luke Carson:We'll be back after a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Lax Coffee Co., the first creative speciality coffee company, building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond. Lux Coffee Co. offers exceptional coffee sourced from around the world through ethical and sustainable practices. And you can discover the current range of signature blends and single origins, coffee hardware and accessories along with exceptional apparel at luxcoffee.co.uk. You can use the code podcast to get 15 % off your first order.

21:34those are not elements of therapy that you would require is it like the sirens and screaming but i think there is something about once you grow up in a city you need that urban noise you need those elements because i remember living somewhere which was quiet literally and it's just only the other side of town and i was like something's not quite right this is just viciously too quiet because you need that hump you need that bus because it makes you believe that you're close to the important things, you're close to people, you're close to the energy. So yeah, I know what you mean. Coming back and we get it in London, you just hear the sirens.

22:08I used to live near, I used to live near hospital in London and I was busy, noisy, but yeah, I know exactly where I am in the world because I know something's happening. We're going to take it to the film school because I want to know how you ended up there because now I know that you worked with a tutor in the darkest times to improve your scores and get there. But what was the motivation in the first place to actually go into film school and what was your film influences? The first one that got me that I'll never forget was Lehane, French film from 1995. That actually struck a chord in me when I was 14 years old.

22:44One of my dear friends, who's someone I've known since I was about six or seven years old, he's another very strong figure and influence in my life, Conrad Lensky. Conrad's an amazing creative producer. and Conrad's older brother used to win quite a few VMAs back in the day and MTV awards for his music video direction and so he had introduced us to a more niche raw film experience from a very early age I think that was a big part of it and then through that I was always very inspired by music video direction and then growing up in New York City one of my best friend's dad's in his heyday and his 90s and 80s runs was a prominent graffiti artist and so all the video vhs footage of just going into the subway tracks and documenting people skateboarding and also drug usage and just the rawness of new york i really felt compelled by more documentaries specifically and lehane kind of feels that because it pays tribute to a real situation which was police brutality.

23:48And so, yeah, I think that was absolutely the eureka moment. And to clarify a little bit, I got to Chapman. That was the name of the school and the film school is called Dodge and it's within Chapman. And so the way I realized and got the inside scoop was if you wanted to get admitted to Dodge, the film school, you needed to at least get into Chapman, keep a straight A portfolio and then apply internally. So then after one full year at Chapman, playing basketball on the team and taking all sorts of courses, but then also taking courses that I was interested film related wise, then I kept my grades at a 4.0 straight A's and then went to the film school.

24:34But as you can imagine, as you understand, it's still the same place. So I got to finally dive I was a film major by a sophomore year. And it was the first time in my life I can truthfully say I took school very seriously. Because I wanted that creative outlet badly. And I liked what stood out to me actually most about Chapman's film program. Were the creative entrepreneurs that came out of that school at a very young age. And to this day, people that I rely on call on for big production shoots. Whether it's, yeah, I mean, I can go down the list for the type of brands that they work on. and they're younger than me in some cases or a little older in the 25 to 29 ballpark which is pretty surreal the level of expertise this film school produced so that was a really attractive quality very interesting that you've chosen that you've named one of the heaviest darkest french movies i've ever heard of because it's actually it's come up the other day in the press again it says why was lehane so important at the time when he came up because i don't remember specifically any of the story but i remember the heaviness the grittiness the energy of this and it's amazing what a body of work that is because when you create a lasting impression it's just that is the masterpiece of filmmaking do you remember how you felt when you watched that movie for the first time because it's interesting we talked about new york and i was expecting i didn't know the answer so i was like what is it gonna be and you've taken it totally somewhere else which is amazing definitely well i've always been really inspired by the workwear streetwear apparel so you think of the car hearts baggy jeans timberlands really the new york ethos and you feel that a lot throughout the film of lane and i think it's also my upbringing around a more creative and graffiti scene i grew up obsessed with skateboarding really diehard on supreme at a very early age had family friend connections that were people at Supreme.

26:31So we'd get showered in gifts before that brand became the brand that is today, like before there were lines around the corner. And so I think it just spoke again to this rawness of Paris and a side of Paris that you don't get to learn about ever. I think that's what was really compelling to me. And then also, I've always been very politically aware and passionate about my stance on how people should be treated. whether your ethnicity, your race, your sexual orientation. That has been a huge, huge, huge part of growing up in New York City is a sense of acceptiveness and loving people for who they are and not what they look like or et cetera.

27:11And so I think that was another element too, where I remember going to George Floyd protests and getting on the Brooklyn Bridge at a very young age and stopping the traffic there with friends in high school. Police brutality specifically, I think, struck a chord with me at a very, very early age. Again, I grew up in New York City, so I was open to so many different cultures, playing in basketball. Predominantly, I was usually the only white guy on my team. And I was just seeing how different their perspective and their life was when I'd go back for sleepovers at their house or go to their neighborhoods and play basketball.

27:45And it was just a different perspective, but I think, again, unique to living in New York City because I remember we had to leave, as I mentioned, after 9-11, and we went to a small bubble in South Carolina for a year or two and drastically everything changes and everyone's in these doubles and they don't understand these bigger problems so long gated answer but I think Lehane just kind of struck chords and so many different elements and then it was also super cool because Lehane specifically I saw when I was 14 I was introduced by a friend to this day I trust his judgment on anything film or music related and so then when I got to the film school of my dreams that was one of the first films they had us watch and study.

28:28I was like, ah, okay, this is clearly, there was something behind this when my friend introduced me to this six years later. And I had a chip on my shoulder already kind of knowing the film. And then fast forward to two years ago, there's a great film theater called Metrograph that my friend's older brother, Conrad's older brother, who I mentioned as one BMA's for music direction, his name is Matt Lenski. Matt Lenski is a partial owner of Metrograph, which is a theater here in New York City that shows more indie art house films. And so I got to see Lehane on 35mm about two years ago, and I cried.

29:01I didn't think I'd ever get to see a film that intense and relevant to my life in terms of the impact it had in theaters. It came out before I was born, so to have that privilege was super cool and full circle. I think we piecing together the streetwear culture, the clothing, the fashion, the music videos, the storytelling, and the grittiness of Lehane, it's such a masterpiece yeah and somehow i can piece in that sort of that vision board and i imagine a vision board i can piece with your dad's work and it's because he was never about clean or pretty yeah no definitely not always about just sort of breaking rules and doing whatever he wanted and how much of a awareness did you have of his work because it's not difficult to ask group of students yeah who do you like and they'll be like almost encyclopedically knowledgeable about david carlson's work yeah and because it's really creative i mean for certain people that's that's really their what i would call the blood group they really understand it yeah they really relate to it but for you were you aware of what he was doing because it sounds like your mom was doing similar work because obviously if they work for ray gunner kind of stuff so what was the awareness like of his work i think growing up it was more just father and son relationships same with my younger sister holidays Christmas presents birthday gifts just spending time together I think it was more just that as a kid for sure and figuring out my own lane figuring out my own curiosities and then truth be told when I approached him in fall of 2022 to say hey I would like to give this a shot I think I have a good grasp on type of brands that you should be working with at this stage of your career especially because he didn't have a representative at that specific time.

30:48I obviously need to digest the work a lot more. And so that's when I really became a fan and a diehard fan in its own right. And then I also just started to have these wow moments where I was like, wow, this makes sense. The way I am, the way I think, what attracts me, what doesn't attract me. A big thing that he always teaches is trusting your intuition, your gut. He never had schooling. There were no rules to break. It just is what made sense to him and communicated. And, you know, as you know, it came with a lot of hate mail in the early days. It came with a lot of what is this crap, but he never, never second guessed himself.

31:26And I think that's an approach that I've always found useful for my life is trusting my gut. Take that risky trip to Vietnam without knowing where you're going. Buy those jeans that you found in Japan, even though they're a little out of budget because you really believe in the brand and the person making them. Those are smaller decisions. But again, that intuition aspect. Yeah, the last three years have been a super fun scavenger hunt because I've been collecting beach culture magazines, ray guns. I've been, people have been sending me stuff. I've found magazines that I wasn't even aware he worked on.

32:00And then we can have these great dialogues and conversations about his experiences during those moments. And that stuff in itself is a really valuable learning experience and gets me even more hooked on the process. and not only that and I think what's worked well for us the last two three years is that yes I'm now a major fan and always have been but it's really now I understand what he's worked on but what is really interesting and almost luck but then again it's in the blood the Carson blood is I know what makes sense for his brand in his aesthetic I can't stand all these bigger artist collaborations with big name brands where it's just let's say let's put one giant with one giant and you guys have to take this you have to enjoy it because we don't know what else to give you guys and you see the same graphics by the same artists every single time and it's just licensing after licensing after licensing and there's no more originality and i felt like from the get-go of approaching this work relationship with him i just knew we couldn't go that route because that's not true to the essence of his brand if you will so yeah this is interesting because yeah as you says the carson intuition is in the blood because one of the things that you have to give to your dad is he's david carson he's always been david carson it was never anybody else and he stayed exactly who he was because i was chatting to him at someone at an event in mexico and i said so how are you doing it's like oh look i've never been busy things are still going really strong and you kind of think that is the biggest testament to someone's career because if you really accept who you are and i think there was no even need that oh i'm gonna accept who i am because the world is busy because it sounds like he started with zero he got to one from one to 100 for one to 1000 this is the almost linear career i was like i'm gonna do this i'm gonna double down and really stick to it because he lives and brings what he does and he doesn't have to imitate anything and i think that's the biggest gift of being able to do this because as you were saying obviously you've got brand partnerships where you've got a pretty face and a swoosh or whatever and it's just it's more about image licensing as a photo licensing this is not to speak of any ill of brand partnerships or collaborations but when i see what you guys did i think with makaland recently and there was as you mentioned that there was a hate mail before but i think there's a hate mail now but people call it visual pollution because they don't like because it's too busy i was like this is the biggest compliment because in a world which is beige and influences where whatever color of taupe you're like let's disrupt it actually let's do this because i am not the biggest fan of the work but i'm biggest fan of the man because the man has become something that is unachievable by some others because he stands for himself so when it comes to partnerships for example the work you did recently with rafa what does the process entail obviously what is your work as a producer that you stand between the legend and the brand and yeah make sure that everyone is happy with what's being made so how does the for example partnership like that come together yeah day in day out i'm always going into my own recollection of brand that i admire moments in time stores that have impacted me the rafa clubhouse in new york always stood out to me because i grew up around the corner it's been around i believe for about almost 10 years now, if not a little longer.