In a 2013 New Yorker article about the shop he boasted about selling everything from copies of the Daily News from the day President Obama was elected for a more than a 200 percent markup to green tea KitKats and, of course, Yeezys. On Thursdays, the day Supreme releases new product, the store only allows in customers who had previously signed up for a raffle and were given a specific shopping time slot.īut Peter, who is now in his 30s, was prescient and he had a talent for flipping goods. Today, the frenzy around the brand is so extreme that lines form regularly just to enter the store. There were online forums for streetwear enthusiasts, but it was a niche subcultural interest.
When Unique Hype first opened less than a mile away from the original Supreme Soho store, collecting streetwear was still a relatively new idea. He asked Ma, his very supportive mother who was working as a babysitter at the time, to act as his day-to-day manager. In 2006, he decided to open a shop in a small space he found in the basement of a Chinatown mall on Elizabeth street. Here, her son Peter became obsessed with skate-inspired fashion, especially Supreme, and he started collecting. There, she had received a business degree. OG Ma, born Lam Xie, moved to New York City with her two sons from Shenzen, China, in 1992. “Everybody like that,” Ma turned to me and said of the photo shoot once it ended and another satisfied customer walked out the door. Unique Hype is the standard bearer and OG Ma is its mythical leading figure. This is why, even as stores working off similar reselling concepts have proliferated around the city (Stadium Goods, Flight Club, CopVsDrop) and new e-commerce reselling start-ups continue to pop up online (Grailed, StockX) Ma’s remains the premiere destination. Unique Hype has been open for about 12 years, satisfying Supreme lovers’ demand for the brand, which is often just too great for the supply. The effect is kind of like if one day, all of a sudden, Post Malone decided to get ripped and dedicate all of his Instagram space to extolling the skin-care virtues of Vitamin C serum surprising and intriguing. Ma is petite and delicate, her English is limited (we spoke through a translator at times) and she wouldn’t tell me her age (she’s reportedly in her late-50s), but Ma dresses like a hypebeast and she thinks like a hypebeast and she acts like a hypebeast - only she is not a teenage male. OG Ma stood next to her newest customer, crossed her arms, and just barely hinted at a smile. We were at Unique Hype Collection, a reselling shop that primarily trades in Supreme clothes and accessories from previous seasons as well as the items from current seasons that sell out the moment they’re put up for sale. Roxas, beaming next to her, raised the Supreme shopping bag that carried his latest purchase. “They ask me, OG Ma, what do you want?”Īnd she likes her customers back, so Ma indulged Roxas’s request and guided him to stand in front of a wall Supreme bumper stickers, bordered by a collection of signed $100 bills from rappers like Playboi Carti and Juice WRLD, all addressed to her. She later told me that all three of these very rare grails (translation: the rarest and most coveted streetwear items) were gifted to her by her loving customers. She wore a Supreme Araki rose hooded sweatshirt, Nike Mercurial sneakers that were designed in collaboration with Virgil Abloh’s Off-White, and a Louis Vuitton scarf wrapped just so, with the LV monogram positioned right below her chin. Hypebeasts only dream of a fit like hers. He came to Ma’s shop all dressed up for the occasion in a red Supreme cap, Giants football jersey, and a sherpa-lined denim jacket. On this Thursday in January that was Anton Roxas, who had traveled to New York City all the way from the Philippines for this very moment. OG Ma (translation: original gangster mother) had been hearing the question all day, but finally, this time, it was coming from her last customer of the night.
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