Agenda trade show, New York, 2014
Mecca USA
New York · 1995
In the summer of 1995 Tony moved to New York City to launch Mecca USA with Tony Shellman and Lando Felix. Mecca arrived just as American streetwear was turning from a scene into an industry — jeans, tees, jackets and logo knits that dressed a generation and became one of the reference points for the whole category.
That summer also carried a smaller, more particular story: candy-coloured suede New Balance imported from Europe, landing on a New York that had never seen them in those colourways. A footnote, and a lesson about what happens when you move product across a border before the market asks for it.
Marienplatz, Munich, 2015
Munich
Germany · Retail platform
A retail platform in Munich, built to bring American street product into a European market on its own terms. Running a shop floor is a different education from running a label: you find out in real time which pieces people pick up, which they put back, and why.
The Year of…
Denim · Profiled 2007
A denim brand set against a deliberately difficult brief, described in the South China Morning Post in 2007: “I wanted to create a product that could sit next to Gucci or Comme des Garcons, yet not use the haute couture concept.”
In practice that meant holding the construction standard of a luxury house while refusing the pricing theatre and the exclusivity that normally comes attached to it — a premium object without the velvet rope.
Hong Kong
2006 — 2008
The Year of… ran its middle volumes out of Hong Kong, and the city turns up all through the catalogues — shot on the tenement streets, in the markets, under the neon. The 2008 edition is titled outright: Hong Kong to Hollywood.
It also produced the collaboration he seems proudest of. He met Mak Yami, coach of the Hong Kong Fiery Dragons, then reigning world champions, and a descendant of the man he calls the godfather of modern lion dance. Yami ran his own label, Milk Six. Tony had watched the first hip-hop choreographed lion dance in the city, in the Year of the Dog, and the two of them put out the Fiery Dragon jean with a knitwear range behind it. His sign-off in the catalogue: Enter the Dragon!
Hong Kong at night, photographed for The Year of…
Maximal Concepts
Hong Kong · Hospitality
Maximal Concepts is the Hong Kong hospitality group behind Mott 32, Blue Butcher and Brickhouse, founded in 2011. Food and drink have run alongside the clothes for years — his own description of the work puts brand building across fashion, food and beverage in the same sentence.
Tony Only Tony
Own label
A personal label — the point where the taste stops being applied to somebody else's brand and simply becomes the product. Fewer rooms to convince, and nowhere to hide.
TonyMagnetic INC
2002 — present
The house itself, carrying its own trademark since 2002 — every volume of The Year of… was published under it — and registered again in the United States in 2019 across the full apparel range: tops and bottoms, tees, pants and shorts, sweatshirts and hoodies, shirts and jackets, headwear and footwear.
Based in Ho Chi Minh City — close enough to the mills and factories that a sample is a morning's work, and thirty years of knowing what a garment should cost to make properly.
