Many people will go through life regretting at least a few of their past fashion choices. Unfortunately for those raised in the public eye, all less-than-stellar style experiments are well documented on the Internet, incapable of being scrubbed away. Nick Jonas, who shot to stardom at age 11 while performing with his brothers Joe and Kevin as the teen-adored boy band the Jonas Brothers, knows this well. Naturally, he doesn’t look back on everything he wore fondly.

“I mean, I think we all had an Ed Hardy phase, where you had the hat, and the T-shirt, and the shoes—and the jeans, if you were lucky!” he recently told Racked. “Head to toe. Dark times. But we gotta go through the fire to come out knowing what to wear without looking insane.”

May Nick Jonas take solace in the fact that he’s not alone. Madonna, David Beckham, and Kim Kardashian West—among others—were all fans of the label’s ubiquitous apparel in the early aughts. Wearing Ed Hardy was essentially a rite of passage as a celebrity, a passage that has thankfully been closed over the last decade.

Jonas has come through the Ed Hardy fire on the other side with only a couple of bruises to his ego. Since working with stylist Avo Yermagyan, who also styles his brother Joe, as well as Demi Lovato and Sophie Turner, Jonas has developed a more subtle, tailored look that’s pushed him onto many a best-dressed list. As Nick Jonas has learned over the years, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—at least stylistically.