When we do work on a collaboration, I prefer to do it with people over brands. I like when it creates something more than the sum of its parts, and neither party could produce on their own. Too often, I see two great brands working together, and they just make a T-shirt with two logos on it.
I also particularly like to work on skateboards because you’re slightly hampered by the aspect ratio, but otherwise they make great canvases for print art, and they look fantastic both on a wall, or you can skate them and really bash them up. We made skateboards with [artists] Gilbert & George, the Pet Shop Boys, [painter] Brian Clarke, the Francis Bacon estate… people you wouldn’t necessarily see on a board and certainly not on clothing.
You started Thames MMXX ages ago, in 2012, when you were basically a baby.
I was a baby for a little while before I became an old man.
And you just opened your first store — congratulations! Considering how young you were when you started, it’s incredible you are still in business. Why do you think that is?
A lot of good fortune, I suppose. I also picked a good name. I don’t stand by a lot of decisions I made when I was 14, but this was a good one.
Another reason that feels really acute to me, especially over the last three weeks of operating the shop, is that I’ve had the good fortune of growing up with a lot of our customers. I started by selling T-shirts and hoodies directly or advertising them to men around my age, and we’ve grown up together. It’s just wonderful that we have people who have been following us, coming into our shop on Brewer Street and buying their first suit, or a tie, for the first time in their lives, and they are doing it with us.
I like how personal your notes on the Thames MMXX website are.
And the notes have nothing to do with clothing. I’m hesitant or slightly uncomfortable being referred to as a designer. Of course, I love design, skateboards, jewelry, sunglasses, and all the rest on a superficial level. And I want to make the things I want but don’t exist. But more deeply than that, what matters to me is actually speaking to people.
Clothes are very handy in that way. That desire for human interaction is a common denominator across my clothes, my skateboarding, my video series, the newsletters… what you want to do as a creative person is reach people. How you do that is just mechanics.
You’re not comfortable being called a designer. Are you comfortable being called a businessman?
You just reminded me of my Instagram bio, which says “synonym for Salesman @THAMESMMXX”. It’s been a huge, long epiphany for me over the past seven years that actually they are one and the same. There is creativity in business just as much, if not more than, there is in designing the clothes. There are so many steps between having an idea, a good one or bad one, making it the right way, getting it to the right people for the right price, taking the right pictures or videos… There are so many layers to this business we call fashion, and so much room for creativity in every one. And certainly a lot of what keeps me motivated is not the numbers but the growth. It is about growth and about reaching new people. I don’t know if I would call myself a businessman any more than I’d call myself a designer. I’m something in between. I’m certainly not a martyr.
