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"  Photo: Courtesy of Billboard/Michael Seto Between performances by Ludacris, Neon Trees, and YouTube sensation Timeflies, ?uestlove of The Roots served as the DJ at NYC&amp;#039;s Stage 48 last night to celebrate the relaunch of Billboard magazine&amp;#039;s website and print publication.  The drummer and DJ, who has nearly 2.5 million Twitter followers, shares the stage with Jimmy Fallon nightly, and even designed kicks for Nike, sat down with ELLE.com to talk music, fashion, and food. ELLE: The Roots are the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. What&amp;#039;s the greatest piece of fashion advice Fallon has given you? ?uestlove: [Laughs] The greatest piece of fashion advice he&amp;#039;s given me was a command: &amp;#039;You guys must wear suits every night!&amp;#039; When we first started, they thought that would be bad news for The Roots; the idea of wearing suits. Dude, we own like 50 suits\u2026we&amp;#039;re always asking [for advice]. I&amp;#039;ve never seen a Barneys New York bill so big [as that of] Tariq &amp;quot;Black Thought&amp;quot; Trotter, the lead rapper of The Roots. I&amp;#039;m certain he&amp;#039;s the adopted son of Tom Ford and Gucci. I think he has more suits than Jimmy does. Me, I&amp;#039;m just going through like 20 suits, but he&amp;#039;s going through 270 suits. ELLE: Tell us about DJing during fashion week. ?uestlove: John Varvatos had me DJ at his spot, because he chooses a musician or rock unit to represent the brand, so we were his spokespeople. ELLE: What kind of music do you appreciate on the runways when you attend shows? ?uestlove: I&amp;#039;m so confused, because I&amp;#039;m always in between what&amp;#039;s current, as in, what&amp;#039;s pitch for praise, and what&amp;#039;s tomorrow. A lot of times, this third wave of nuevo retro is coming in. I&amp;#039;m told I&amp;#039;m being hired so I can play the obscure soul song or that &amp;#039;50s doo-wop song. A lot of times when I get called for fashion week or to DJ runway stuff, there are certain themes to it. I&amp;#039;m more knowledgeable in retro music, so that&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m usually called for. ELLE: With almost 2.5 million Twitter followers, are there any famous faces in fashion that you follow for style, music, or other inspiration? ?uestlove: In terms of being a &amp;quot;sneakerhead,&amp;quot; there was one point where I was obsessively following every sneaker blog. That&amp;#039;s the beauty of Twitter: To get the heads up on what&amp;#039;s coming out. ELLE: In the past, you collaborated with Nike to design shoes. Do you have any fashion projects in the works? ?uestlove: I&amp;#039;m part owner of The Hoodie Shop. That&amp;#039;s my new venture. We&amp;#039;ve been open for about a year. It&amp;#039;s quality, custom, everything hoodie\u2013not in terms of a sporting goods store\u2013fashionable hoodies, for like, women who wear bikinis. Everything that you could put a hoodie on.  ELLE: What other projects are you working on? ?uestlove: Food is the next avenue\u2014in Chelsea Market. People have been asking about my food truck. Been making the rounds at various food junctions, debuting my drumsticks. Initially, the idea was to do a fusion food truck, but the people at Chelsea Market said &amp;#039;Come aboard, come join us,&amp;#039; and you don&amp;#039;t say no to the people at Chelsea Market, because they&amp;#039;re extremely hard to get into. [The eatery] is called Hybrid. ELLE: How did the food truck idea come about? ?uestlove: I used to DJ a lot on the West Coast, and after I would DJ, I would see all these really cool [ones]. They were on the food truck bandwagon way before pop-up restaurants and food trucks became fashionable. Out in Portland, they even had specialty trucks like corn on the cob trucks and grilled cheese trucks. ELLE: Do you think fashion and music always influence each other? ?uestlove: I think the music comes first, then comes the fashion, and thus, the lifestyle. I believe it starts with music, and then the person delivering it, delivers the lifestyle, the fashion. Madonna is a great example of that. ELLE: If there was one act or artist, dead or alive, in their beginnings or in their prime, that you could watch in concert, who would you see? ?uestlove: It&amp;#039;s a tie. I would love to have some sort of Back To The Future Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid. Also, all of the Prince shows that I wasn&amp;#039;t allowed to go see as a kid, that I&amp;#039;ve since seen on video. I would have liked to have been there firsthand. Click here for live updates on the latest breaking music news. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/news/a17810/questlove-interview-billboard-party/>