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" This year, New York-based designer Tim Coppens is nominated for the CFDA Swarovski Award for the second year in a row. But in the short time since Coppens founded his label he&amp;#039;s already been on the receiving end of numerous awards. In 2012 he took home the Ecco Domani Award for Best New Menswear Designer, in 2013 he given the Fashion Group International Rising Star of the Year award, and he was a finalist in the Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund Award. Oh, and right now he&amp;#039;s a semi-finalist for the LVMH Prize. But Coppens knows that this doesn&amp;#039;t mean anything without a quality product and stores willing to sell it. In fact his whole career, his whole outlook is about balance\u2014balancing the commercial with the creative, the business with the design, the traditional with the offbeat. Perhaps this tension is what has captured the attention of judges and retailers like Barneys, Dover Street Market, and Mr Porter.com. We spoke to the designer about how stays inspired, what he was doing before he had his own label, and what made him decide to strike out on his own. Read on for more:  Esquire.com: Congrats on your CFDA Award nomination. It&amp;#039;s been a big year for you.Tim Coppens: Thanks.  ESQ: So, walk me through your last two collections \u2026 how do you usually start your design process? Do you do research or create a mood board \u2026TC: Well, for me it&amp;#039;s actually quite easy to explain. I&amp;#039;m working on spring/summer [2015] right now, and it really starts with fabrics. I have 500 swatches and I have to start narrowing them down. So for fall/winter 2014 collection, when I started I had just bought this King Krule album\u2014he&amp;#039;s this young singer out of Manchester, I think, and he has this amazing voice, he makes his own printed shirts. He&amp;#039;s really cool and I thought he was really interesting. At the same time, I started working with Linda Farrow on sunglasses and I found these really cool snow goggles. So this idea of mountaineering mixed with King Krule just came together. It all blends together. You know, you create a collection and then you have to edit it down to help it tell a story on the runway. For me, it always has to be streamlined. There has to be a clean line running through it, you know? With all the patterns and graphics, it still needs to be coherent and cohesive. The concept has to come through.  ESQ: Is that how you always approach it? Or is it particular to each season?TC: Yeah. You know, something always comes up that sparks something. My next collection is based on the cover of The Economist, but I won&amp;#039;t say which one. But each season you want to do better. So I thought that fall 2014 was a step up from spring, but now this spring has to be a step up from there. That&amp;#039;s the exciting part about being a designer. Reach is also a really important thing for me. I don&amp;#039;t want to create clothes for a museum, I want people to see them, to wear them. But then the challenge is how do I stay true to that original concept but create clothing that can be worn by a wide audience? It has to do with creativity, of course, but I have to be attuned to the market and what consumers are interested. It&amp;#039;s not like if everyone loves black I&amp;#039;ll make an all-black collection, but I want to make something that feels right for the time.  ESQ: It&amp;#039;s challenging to balance all that. And, at the end of the day, I&amp;#039;ve always thought it&amp;#039;s hard to make things that everyone knows\u2014a T-shirt, a jacket, a pair of pants\u2014new and interesting without being crazy.TC: For me when there&amp;#039;s a story behind it, it helps me make things more interesting.  ESQ: So what was your starting point for spring, since that&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s available now.TC: A relative of mine\u2014not someone very close, though\u2014was a Formula 1 racer in the 1970s and his name popped up on something I was looking at. And then I was at a book store and found a couple books on Formula 1 racers, and specifically ones from that time period. That&amp;#039;s when the sport was still risky and drivers were grateful to get out of their cars alive. It was more glamorous. The technology wasn&amp;#039;t as advanced, though, so it was more exciting and dangerous too. So I took the idea of stripes and boiler suits \u2026 but you have to reinterpret them. I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s good to be too literal. And once that was in place, I started thinking about the fabrics.    Looks from Coppens&amp;#039; fall/winter 2014 collection  ESQ: It sounds like the fabrics are a huge part of your design process.TC: Totally. The feel and the look of the textiles is incredibly important. Even for something like a white shirt\u2014and I don&amp;#039;t really wear white shirts myself\u2014the density, the yarn, all these things are important and can make a piece special. You know there&amp;#039;s so many white shirts out there, how do I make mine special? It&amp;#039;s like sheets. There&amp;#039;s a ton out there but when you sleep on a really great pair, it changes the way you think about them.  ESQ: OK, so going back, did you always know you wanted to be a designer?TC: Not really. I was raised in a creative family, but no one pushed me to do anything creative. I was always into making things and, at one point, I wanted to be an architect but the whole math and physics thing became a little too much. So I started focusing on fashion. ESQ: Did you study fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts?TC: When I started there yeah, that was after I stopped studying architecture.  ESQ: So what happened after that?TC: I went to Spain for a year and freelanced, then I started working for a company called Bogner in Munich for a year. Then I started working for Adidas.  ESQ: Were you designing their apparel?TC: Yeah. I was working on a line that was more technical and performance-based. It&amp;#039;s funny because I was just looking at a Raf Simons shoe the other day and its totally built around those ideas, but when I was at Adidas, the hole tech-y, performance thing was just starting. It&amp;#039;s really cool because these days you can go so far with technology. Big companies like Adidas had the money to test out those sort of things, like new fabrics, or new construction techniques. And then I moved to New York and worked at Ralph Lauren for three years.  ESQ: What made you want to go out on your own and launch your own label?TC: That was always the plan in the back of my head. But when I graduated, I knew that I wasn&amp;#039;t going to be able to do that immediately, it takes certain know-how. You have to learn how to produce it, you have to fund it. So it took me some time to learn those things, and they become easier when you have those experience. My business operates differently from a large company like Adidas or Ralph Lauren, but, in the end, we do the same thing, we just do it on a small scale.  ESQ: I think a lot of young designers are pressured into growing too quickly these days, though.TC: For me, what&amp;#039;s important right now is that I&amp;#039;m involved in\u2014I won&amp;#039;t say everything, but a lot of things. I want to keep the business tight and I want to take our successes and help move them forward. To me, control is still very important, and to make it clear what we&amp;#039;re about and for my hand to be in it. I&amp;#039;m involved in P.R., I&amp;#039;m involved in sales.  ESQ: There are advantages to being that involved, though.TC: I want to be doing this in five years and I want the brand to be bigger, so I have to be involved. I can&amp;#039;t be working in a bubble. This is a creative field, but it&amp;#039;s also a business, and I have to feed both aspects.    Backstage from Tim Coppens&amp;#039; spring/summer 2014 show  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a28713/tim-coppens-interview-2014/>