Stephen Sprouse

I watched television a little, but I mostly just drew and read magazines.

I got to the point where I was sick of fashion again, like I was at the end of high school.

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

Maybe if they all could he combined – art, rock and fashion. Those were always my favorite things.

I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.

The photograph, the clothes, the sets – this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.

I grew up in Columbus, Indiana, a kind of industrial and farmland place.

I would just sketch everything that was being made for the collections.

When I went to college, I wasn’t interested in fashion anymore – I was interested in art.

I guess you just fall into things when to you’re supposed to.

That’s how I taught myself how to draw – tracing the ads and petting new clothes on the models.

But after the time there I’d had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn’t last very long.

I lived in town until I was eight and then I moved nearer the farmland, so I had a mixture.

I finished high school there and then I went to Rhode Island School of Design.

I don’t know if it’s a movement, but the only thing new that’s happening is that I think music and art and video and fashion are all kind of thrown into one big ball that’s on television, and people see that all the time – you see a fusion of all those things.