"Made by Chinese," to be more specific, is the calling card of Shanghai Tang – Hong Kong industrialist and über-entrepreneur David Tang's swank brand of all things Cathay. Based in Hong Kong, Shanghai Tang specializes in fusing old-China fashion with brave-new-world styles and colors. Neon pink, tart lime and confectionary blue traditional women’s jackets and dresses (qi pao's), men's Mandarin suits and children’s wear with names like “Double Fish Tang,” “Velvet Tang,” “Eight Ferries Silk” and “Happiness Tang” are characteristic of the clothier's stock. The bulk of Shang-Tang couture is handled exclusively by the brand’s tailoring appendage, Imperial Tailors.

Beside the wearable, Shanghai Tang also designs such housewares as silver photo frames, silk photo albums, and silver-plated dim sum baskets and trinkets such as postcards and ma hwa teddy bears. And for that multitasking neo-Commie Cold-War nostalgist, Shanghai Tang offers a line of watches and cufflinks with Mao's image, so you can keep time with the revolution while noshing at Nobu.

Shanghai Tang has become obscenely popular in Hong Kong as well as in other fashion-obsessed, disposable-income areas of East Asia. Its flagship store in central Hong Kong's posh Pedder Building offers the “best of 5,000 years of Chinese tradition exploding into the 21st century.” The store also boasts more than four million visitors since 1994. Whether it is the designs or the message, the company has seen profits compound and has opened stores in London, Shanghai, Singapore and New York.

In its own words – a mouthful repeated at every opportunity by David Tang – Shanghai Tang aims to “create the first global Chinese lifestyle brand by revitalizing Chinese designs – interweaving traditional Chinese culture with the dynamism of the 21st century.”

Much of the brand’s success can be credited to its ability to often be as tongue-in-cheek as chic. Its designs stick specifically to the brand's mission statement by capitalizing on an exclusive gentrified coolie look in order to both restore respect to traditional Chinese fashion while at the same time de-arming imperialist stereotypes by bringing them aesthetically into the fold. In a prime example of the latter, the Hong Kong store retails the book “The World of Suzie Wong.” The brand’s unique name derives from the legendary urban-opium-den, jazz-hall, flapping old-imperialist Shanghai of the 1920s and 30s – the "Paris of the East,” "New York of the West" or less charitably, "the whore of the Orient.”

The Tang bulldozer has run out of steam on several occasions however. Two years ago the company was forced to close its US $12M (13.4M euros), 12,000-square-foot New York adventure on Park Avenue just 20 months after it opened. This after the store was forced to actually turn away some very recognizable faces on opening day due to overcrowding. Such premature ejection from such prominent digs was the juggernaut’s first real public slap on the face; a comeuppance usually deserved and most commonplace on any hot new brand’s road to the global big show.

Real estate impediments aside, it remains to be seen if the global-brand hopeful’s global market can move past kitsch Chinese-character tattoos and mood bracelets and become fully comfortable with looking and living “Made by Chinese.” David Tang is nothing though if not determined (not to mention grotesquely wealthy) and he says it's just a matter of time before Shanghai Tang becomes the global brand he knows it can, and should, be.

Abram D. Sauer is a writer currently living in New York. He was a columnist for The China Daily while living in Beijing and is co-founder of Chopstickfactory.com.