Now they’re twenty dollars!” He adds, “I used to do green-tea Kit Kats. Like, the day after Obama was elected, I got copies of the Daily News for fifty cents each. Peter, who was born in Guangzhou, refers to himself as a “major flipper,” a businessman who will buy and resell, well, anything: “clothing, real estate, food, anything. With the eBay store, I even pack it and ship it myself,” he said, before pausing and thinking about this for a second. (Peter was actually under only four eyes: two posters of Lady Gaga looking at the camera while modelling a Supreme T-shirt hung on the ceiling above him.) “I do everything myself.
“I can’t show my face-I’m under a lot of eyes,” he said, sitting on a stool inside Unique Hype Collection last week. “I’ve brought in seven figures a year for the last two years,” said Peter, the owner of the store, a thirty-year-old who refused to give his last name or be photographed. The store even uses authentic Supreme shopping bags, recycled from purchases made at Supreme.
On a recent Friday afternoon, a cap that had gone on sale on Thursday at Supreme for forty-eight dollars was on the shelf at Unique Hype Collection for eighty-five dollars, where teen-agers were eyeing it jealously. Much of its merchandise goes to Japan, where Supreme goods can cost twice what they do here at retail. The enterprise, which its owner refers to as Unique Hype Collection, is in the business of buying clothing from the skate-inspired men’s fashion brand Supreme at retail prices, waiting until the items have sold out at Supreme’s physical stores and online shop, and then putting those items up for sale in the mall and on eBay at significant markups. It has no sign and it’s not on the mall directory. Inside a run-down mall off of Elizabeth Street in Chinatown, down an escalator to the basement and past a raft of empty storefronts, is a minuscule store, the size of a walk-in closet, that’s quietly at the center of a peculiar global fashion empire.
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