Sam's Tailor is a tailor in Hong Kong. It is noted for the roster of its clientele, which includes British royalty, American presidents, and international celebrities. [1]
The shop was founded by Sam Melwani in 1957, after he signed a contract to produce the uniforms of British soldiers stationed in Hong Kong. [1] The shop is still run by his sons, Manu and Sham Melwani, as well as his grandson Roshan Melwani. [1] It is located in Burlington Arcade on 94 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Clientele have included Queen Elizabeth II, Ronald Reagan, Prince Philip, King Charles, U.S. Presidents Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, UK Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. [2] The tailoring shop also dressed celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, Bruno Mars, Russell Crowe, [2] John McEnroe, George Michael, Michael Jackson, Boris Becker, Bob Hawke, Kylie Minogue, David Bowie, Richard Gere, Michael McElligott and Luca Marchesi. Until the handover in 1997, it was one of the few official uniform tailors for British troops in Hong Kong, along with Yuen's Tailor, etc. [3] [4] Sam's Tailor was honoured with a postage stamp on the 50th anniversary of its founding.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the shop began utilizing social media, to showcase their product, with comedic videos often featuring Roshan Melwani. [5] The shop currently has 1.6 million followers on TikTok and nearly 350K followers on Instagram. [6]
Michael Palin had his suit made there while doing his travel documentary, Around the World in 80 Days with Michael Palin . [7]
The location was a site of the Detour in the eleventh leg of the reality TV show The Amazing Race 27 with Roshan Melwani making an appearance. [8]
Richard Ayoade visited the shop and had a suit made with Jon Hamm in Travel Man .
Video clips refer to mostly short videos, which are usually silly jokes and funny clips, often from movies or entertainment videos such as those on YouTube. Short videos on TikTok and YouTube often influence popular culture and internet trends. Such clips are usually taken out of context and have many gags in them. Sometimes they can be used to attract the public to the user's other accounts or their long-form videos. The term is also used more loosely to mean any video program, including a full program, uploaded onto a website or other medium.
The Peninsula Hong Kong is a colonial-style luxury hotel located in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong. It is the flagship property of The Peninsula Hotels group, part of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Group. The hotel opened in 1928 and was the first under The Peninsula brand. Expanded in 1994, the hotel combines colonial and modern elements, and is notable for its large fleet of Rolls-Royces painted a distinctive "Peninsula green".
Gieves & Hawkes is a bespoke men's tailor and menswear retailer located at 1 Savile Row in London, England. The business was founded in 1771. It was acquired in 2012 by the Hong Kong conglomerate Trinity Ltd., which was in turn purchased by Shandong Ruyi in 2017. After Trinity was subject to a winding-up petition for debt in September 2021, Gieves & Hawkes was acquired in November 2022 by Frasers Group, owner of Sports Direct.
Hot Toys Limited is a Hong Kong production house for designing, developing, and manufacturing highly detailed collectible merchandise to worldwide markets. They are known for their high end 1/6th scale figurines of licensed properties, like Marvel and Star Wars, which must be preordered. Hot Toys collectibles are primarily available to purchase from secondary retailers, like Sideshow.
The sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live aired several critically acclaimed sketches parodying then Alaskan Governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2008 United States presidential election. The sketches featured former cast member Tina Fey, who returned as a guest star to portray Palin. Fey won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her impersonation of Palin.
An internet celebrity, also referred to as an internet personality, is an individual who has acquired or developed their fame and notability on the Internet. The growing popularity of social media provides a means for people to reach a large, global audience, and internet celebrities are commonly present on large online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, which primarily rely on user-generated content. Some internet celebrities are also social media influencers, known simply as influencers, due to their social influence online.
Edmund Ser is a Malaysian fashion designer and businessman based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is best known for his designer brand, Edmund Ser of Malaysia. He created the Edmund Ser, Spade, and SER fashion labels. He has been a guest judge on Project Runway Malaysia, as well as judging the Malaysia Young Designers' competition and the Miss Malaysia Pageant.
Raja Fashions are a bespoke tailor based in Hong Kong with sales operations in other countries. The company's business model is to take measurement from clients abroad, for instance in Europe and North America, after which clothes are produced by tailors based in China.
The 2013 MTV Video Music Awards were held on August 25, 2013, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Marking the 30th installment of the award show, they were the first to be held in New York City not to use a venue within the borough of Manhattan. Nominations were announced on July 17, 2013. Leading the nominees were Justin Timberlake and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis with six, followed by Bruno Mars, Miley Cyrus, and Robin Thicke with four. Pop singer Justin Timberlake was the big winner on the night with four awards, including Video of the Year for "Mirrors" and the Michael Jackson Vanguard Award. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift were also among the winners of the night. The ceremony drew a total of 10.1 million viewers.
Davin Tong, better known by his alias Peter Chao, is a Canadian actor, comedic vlogger, and YouTube personality known for his unconventional portrayals of Asian stereotypes, which alongside other comedic videos have amassed a following of over 1.2M followers on TikTok and almost 800,000 subscribers on YouTube. Born and raised in New Brunswick, Canada, Tong is the second son of "Chinese immigrants", while his character Chao was born and raised in Hong Kong. Tong is bilingual, speaking both fluent English and Cantonese.
Zachary Michael King is an American internet personality based in Los Angeles. He is most known for his "magic vines," which are six-second videos digitally edited to look as if he is doing magic. He calls his videos "digital sleight of hand." He began posting videos on YouTube in 2008 and in 2013 he started posting videos to Vine. King posted his first video to TikTok in 2016, and has since attracted over 90 million followers, making him the sixth most-followed individual on the platform.
The Hong Kong tailors are a well-known attraction in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is still home to several bespoke tailors, who have stitched suits for foreign politicians like Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Bob Hawke and celebrities like King Charles, Kevin Spacey, Boris Becker, David Bowie, Richard Gere and Michael Jackson.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 60 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app or the web.
Charli Grace D'Amelio is an American social media personality and dancer. She was a competitive dancer for over a decade before starting her social media career in 2019, when she began posting dance videos on the video-sharing platform TikTok. She quickly amassed a large following and subsequently became the most-followed creator on the platform in March 2020 until she was surpassed by Khaby Lame in June 2022. With over 155 million followers, she is the second most-followed person on TikTok, as of 2024.
There are reports of TikTok censoring political content related to China and other countries as well as content from minority creators. TikTok says that its initial content moderation policies, many of which are no longer applicable, were aimed at reducing divisiveness and were not politically motivated.
In 2020, the United States government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.
Luke Magnus Nicolson, known as Francis Bourgeois, is a British trainspotter, social media personality, model, and author. He is most known for his lighthearted and humorous videos on the topic of trains, posted to TikTok and Instagram. As of May 2023, he has over 2.9 million TikTok followers and 2.3 million Instagram followers.
Libs of TikTok is a handle for various far-right and anti-LGBT social-media accounts operated by Chaya Raichik, a former real estate agent. Raichik uses the accounts to repost content created by left-wing and LGBT people on TikTok, and on other social-media platforms, often with hostile, mocking, or derogatory commentary. The accounts promote hate speech and transphobia, and spread false claims, especially relating to medical care of transgender children. The Twitter account, also known by the handle @LibsofTikTok, has over 3.5 million followers as of September 2024 and has become influential among American conservatives and the political right. Libs of TikTok's social-media accounts have received several temporary suspensions and a permanent suspension from TikTok.
Grace Eleanor Keeling, known professionally as GK Barry, is an English internet personality, social media influencer and presenter. Keeling began posting on video-sharing platform TikTok in 2020 whilst completing a film studies degree at Nottingham Trent University, during which she worked on the BBC soap opera Doctors. After one year of posting lifestyle videos on the app, she surpassed 1 million followers. She began presenting a podcast, Saving Grace, in April 2022, which sees her interviewing various celebrities. She has since gone on to tour the Saving Grace podcast around the UK.
Ve'ondre Mitchell is an American internet celebrity, recording artist, and activist. She co-created the 2024 song "It Girl " with Aliyah's Interlude, which received over 3.5 million streams on Spotify. Mitchell served as a Youth Ambassador for the Human Rights Campaign in 2021 and was featured in GLAAD's 20 Under 20 List. She was nominated for "TikTok Queer Advocate of the Year" at the 32nd GLAAD Media Awards.