My Korean name is 설호. 雪虎. Snow tiger.
I was born in November, the week the first snow fell that year. In Korea it is an ordinary thing to name a child for the weather he arrived in. Nobody meant it to become a brand.
SNO is snow. TYGA sounds like the tiger.
But TYGA is also a name I gave myself, years later, in the coldest season I have lived through. I was in pain and I was alone, and I did not expect either one to end. It did not end the way I asked. God came anyway, and stayed, and told me He would keep staying. I wrote four words down that year and I have not needed different ones since.
Thank You, God. Always.
TYGA is the first letter of each.
Put the two halves back together and you get the mark on every piece I make. From across a room it reads as a snowflake. Up close, the strokes have fur in them.
What this has to do with you
I did not start this because the world needs more clothing.
Somewhere in my early thirties I stopped wanting to be noticed for what I had on. I wanted the opposite — to get dressed without thinking about it, and to be taken seriously anyway. That turns out to be hard to buy. Most menswear is built to be seen this season. Almost none of it is built to disappear into the man wearing it.
So I am making the second kind. The colors come from the light in Malibu at about six-thirty in the morning. That light has never been in fashion and has never been out of it.
Where I actually am
One person, and early. I have thrown away more than I have kept.
Some of what you find here I made. Some of it I chose. The page will tell you which.
And one rule, because it is the only one that means anything before you have held something of mine: the photograph is the garment. What is on the page is what arrives in the box.
What I will write here
Not launches. I will show you what I rejected — the sample that came back wrong, the color that was almost right, the pair of shoes I worked on all night that came out crooked anyway.
That is the only proof a new brand has.
Choose less. Wear it longer.
— TYGA