Eight chapters

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.

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!

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.