Evan Mock has good timing. There’s the time he buzzed off his thick brown coif and dyed his hair electric pink, sending ripples of copycatting through the Internet. Then the time Frank Ocean posted a video of a then 20-year-old Mock shiftlessly grinning and skating somewhere off in California. (Ocean had been sent the video by a mutual friend and artist Tom Sachs.) The timely moments culminated in the fashion industry’s irrevocable love for Mock, landing him in the hearts of brands like Salvatore Ferragamo, Paco Rabanne, and Saint Laurent.

For all his good timing, the surfer-skater-turned-model’s quite literally overnight ascent has posed challenges to living in the now: “It’s hard for me to be present when so much cool shit has happened in the last six months—[shit] I’ll probably forget about in a year or so,” he says. Thankfully his knack for photography offers a means for future reflection. “My grandpa got me into it because he just had all the old cameras laying around,” says Mock, a native of O‘ahu, on Hawaii’s North Shore. His custom was to finish off his grandfather’s rolls, then wait a few years to develop the photos. “It was fun to kind of go back in time,” he recalls.

Despite his recent globetrotting, like flying to Barcelona for a campaign with fellow model-of-the-moment Alton Mason, Mock is still a beach bum at heart. “I’m so lucky to be able to go back [to Hawaii’s North Shore] at any point in the year and get sunburnt and go surfing and be with pretty much everyone I love,” he says with obvious gratitude.

Mock, who began skating at 12, before branching out into surfing, might look out of place now amongst his old peers. “If you ask a typical, run-of-the-mill surfer or skater to look at me, they’d be like, ‘This is not what a skater looks like,’” he explains. But after three years of living “abroad” in L.A., things are changing. “Every time I go back, they show more and more love.” As far as worries, Mock doesn’t have many. For a multi-talent who grew up swimming with sharks, the fashion industry is a walk in the park. Plus, he knows how to catch a wave at just the right time.