Lights Camera Fashion

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Keith Herron told his mom, Karen, that they were walking to a chicken restaurant. As he led the way through the streets of midtown Manhattan, he feigned vague confusion while deftly steering her to their real destination—smack in the middle of Times Square. Herron waited a beat for his mom to notice her son’s likeness, towering 5 stories tall on what may be the world’s most famous billboard. Spelled out at his feet on the massive screen was his name, and above his head the name of his fashion company, Advisry. Crowning the larger-than-life ad was the Spotify logo: Herron’s streetwear fashion brand regularly releases “Mixtape” playlists on the platform, and this banner moment was the world’s largest audio streaming service’s way of anointing him as one of the coolest kids in town. Not too cool to hug his mom, though, as she wiped away tears of pride and joy.

That was September 2023, right before Herron’s spring/summer 2024 runway show at the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA)’s New York Fashion Week and a year after none other than Vogue  proclaimed that “Advisry is now officially the new emerging brand on the block.” The Sacramento native was all of 23 at the time, but performers were already wearing his clothing on stage, basketball stars were strutting his stuff into stadiums on pregame “tunnel walks,” and the CEO of Gucci knew his name.

Two days later, he lived up to the billboard-sized hype. The show, titled “Technicolor,” took its cues from a film that Herron loves, The Wizard of Oz, with the first of 33 models walking the runway in black and white looks that then gave way to vivid, saturated hues. This was Herron’s first collection to include couture gowns and avant-garde editorial looks—like a pair of dramatically architectural dresses and jackets that made the models look like chic lollipops—as well as exquisite tailoring with stunning unisex wool suiting.

Essence  heralded the collection as a pivotal point in Advisry’s evolution, calling it “a culmination of the designer and his brand’s formative years,” while Complex  included the collection in its “Best of New York Fashion Week” list that season, saying, “With his latest show, [Herron] proves once again that his range and the potential for Advisry may be limitless.” In perhaps the best press of all, “Technicolor” landed Herron in the pages of Vogue Korea, with “It Girl” actress Greta Lee wearing a velvet couture ensemble from the collection. Advisry made it onto fashion’s biggest red carpet that year too, dressing New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé in a dramatic, off-the-shoulder, Chanel-inspired boucle suit for the Met Gala.

Fast-forward two years, and Herron is at New York Fashion Week again, ready to present a new collection, this time for fall/winter 2025 and directly after Calvin Klein on the official CFDA calendar. Loping around the space in Manhattan’s Chelsea Arts District hours before this September event, he exhibits a preternatural calm. When asked how this can possibly be, he smiles, gives an easy shrug and says, “I actually got a great night’s sleep.” He might be young, you see, but Herron is far from inexperienced, and he’s been working with a crack crew of longtime friends handling logistics like music, staging and all-around cat-herding for 12 years, so they’ve got this.

Wait a minute, 12 years? And Herron is 25? Did you just run the math in your head, and do a double take?

Yes, Herron founded his streetwear brand Advisry in the River City when he was just 13 years old and a student at Sutter Middle School (since renamed Miwok Middle School) near McKinley Park, and the circle of friends and collaborators orbiting around him today, including musicians, DJs, photographers and artists—part of a Sacramento creative diaspora living in New York or Los Angeles—dates back to those astonishingly early days.

This winter, hot off the runway, Herron will begin dropping the current season’s pieces for sale on Advisry’s website—a few every month, beginning in December. The phased rollout means streetwear enthusiasts have a chance to savor the collection slowly, the same way music fans fall in love with a favorite artist’s new album one single at a time.

Herron’s family has shown up in full force at the latest fashion show: mom Karen and dad Keith Sr. (they’re divorced, but united in parental pride)—who flew in from Sacramento—as well as Keith’s older sisters, Nia, a freelance concert promoter, and Imani, an herbalist and entrepreneur with her own tea company, both living in L.A. now. Four cousins round out the group of family supporters, everyone dressed head to toe in Advisry.

An oversized program designed to look like a movie poster placed on each assigned seat announces the collection’s theme, “4 Moral Tales,” a play on French New Wave director Éric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales  film series, which Herron has played over and over again, obsessively. “Every time I watch one [of those works], I feel closer to humanity,” he says.

Herron has divided his collection into four “tales,” each referencing one of Rohmer’s Moral Tales: “Detachment” for 1967’s La Collectionneuse, “Restraint” for 1969’s My Night at Maud’s, “Temptation” for 1970’s Claire’s Knee, and “Obsession” for 1972’s Love in the Afternoon. As Herron writes in the show notes, Advisry’s new collection, like the films, “explores the quiet complexities of moral character and how it surfaces through subtle gestures, fleeting glances, and internal contradictions.” In Herron’s visual language, those complexities are made manifest through fashion choices and how they reflect the soul of the wearer—when he dresses a model, it’s as if he’s creating a multidimensional character.

It’s not just talk, either. Brand director Jonathan Richetts, one of Advisry’s two full-time team members besides Herron (the other is Harris Ness, who handles day-to-day operations), whips out his phone to share a video shot in the Advisry showroom space in the lead-up to the show. In the background is a screen displaying Rohmer’s movies. “Éric Rohmer’s films were playing in the office all day, every day, on repeat,” Richetts says.

Herron believes in clothing as a vernacular language through which we express ourselves. But he also has a didactic mission to spread cultural awareness everywhere he goes like fairy dust: Each seat also holds a mylar packet of artist “trading cards” featuring a range of cultural figures (from Oscar winner Sofia Coppola to the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue  cover, Tyler Mitchell).

The pieces that come down the runway are stylistically diverse, but all feel inevitably now and of a moment: A pleated butter leather jacket would be at home on a Louis Vuitton or Gucci runway, while bright-colored rubber galoshes wink at Balenciaga’s poppy Crocs collabs. Earth-toned knitwear as soft as angel wings follows tailored tracksuits in rich checks and stripes, with hand-shaped 3D glove pockets sewn onto the outside of jackets and pants. An oversized striped rugby shirt with a pearl-encrusted collar is layered over pearl-encrusted shorts, accompanied by a Kelly green leather bag shaped like a vintage camera.

This rich tapestry of detail is punctuated by moments of stark drama: A male model with a shock of Billy Idol-platinum hair strides out wearing a cream double-breasted suit and giant shearling mittens, looking like an ice-bound yeti prince. Herron even honors the runway tradition of ending on a bridal look with the yeti’s feminine counterpart, a blonde model in a floating sheer gown and polar-bear-white shrug—like Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen, she embodies both beauty and beast in one perfectly balanced ensemble.

In the afterglow, the show feels like a triumph, and it was heralded as such by the fashion media in the days that follow. Elle  magazine declared Herron one of “the designers defining the future of New York Fashion Week,” while Hypebeast  praised the designer’s “sharp sartorial storytelling,” and Women’s Wear Daily  announced that the collection “pushes streetwear into new territory.” Also sensing that the brand is on the brink of a creative and commercial breakthrough, Essence  described the show as the beginning of a new chapter for Advisry, where “fashion, film, and community continue to intersect, reshaping what a runway can mean.”

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At this point in his young but implausibly long career, Herron has met many of his idols, from Tyler, the Creator to Spike Lee, and he has earned enough cachet to be invited to move Advisry’s headquarters from Brooklyn to what might be New York’s hippest address for creatives, the posh WSA building, a repurposed 31-story Financial District skyscraper The New York Times  declared the first “It” building, calling it “an improbable hub for artists, celebrities and influencers,” and citing boldface names like Bad Bunny, Kendall Jenner and Apple CEO Tim Cook who have socialized there.

The building’s mod lobby looks like a set from A Clockwork Orange, dominated by artist Frank Oelke’s groovy 1969 sculpture bed designed to look like a giant pair of fiberglass feet beneath a trippy, drippy chandelier, and when Herron arrives by bike for a sit-down interview in late August, he leads the way to the third-floor “founders’ lounge,” where acres of stylish rust carpet and various groupings of velvet settees and statement chairs seemingly ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest  give way to panoramic views of the Brooklyn Bridge and South Street Seaport. It’s a pinch-me environment, where attendants in suits and ties glide in the background to allow start-up founders to entertain investors, clients—and the occasional journalist.

“My theory is they want to move in a bunch of cool people who will talk about it and then eventually attract the bigger corporate businesses,” Herron says, explaining why a bevy of emerging brands like his were offered below-market rents—we’re talking in the lounge because the Advisry’s office itself is small, crammed with stuff, and, he says, there’s “not much to see.”

“I don’t know if it’s positive or negative, if it’s exploitative, or giving us opportunities,” Herron says thoughtfully, casting a calm gaze around. “I’m unsure of the morality in it.” It’s two weeks before his “4 Moral Tales” show, and the issue is on his mind as he sits on the brink of potential large-scale commercial success. “This is the first collection since I’ve started doing runway shows, where I’m designing it for people to actually wear it,” Herron says, explaining that past presentations have mixed a few wearable pieces in with high-concept fantasy looks never intended to be produced for sale.

And while most Fashion Week exhibitors are showing next spring’s looks in September, Advisry is practicing an unusual type of what could be called fast high fashion: Buyers from retailers were placing orders by the first week of October for clothes to ship out immediately, including several in South Korea. “The brand is very popular in South Korea,” Keith says. In the meantime, pieces from past collections, like the double-breasted wool jacket ($480) and some of those signature camera bags ($244), are already selling briskly on Advisry’s website, with three monthly waves of new product drops planned to start in December.

Whether a development like the WSA building is good long term for the health of the creative economy or not, it’s good for Advisry in the moment. It’s also a long way from Sacramento’s Pocket area, where Herron grew up idolizing skateboarders and musicians who skateboarded. “They dressed in uniforms,” he says. “They had their brands, and their brands meant something. It was my first intro to the concept of fashion being a community identification tool.”

In 2013, at 13, he had become a fan of the L.A.-based street-art, skate-punk and hip-hop collective Odd Future. The now-Grammy-winning rapper Tyler, the Creator was the group’s frontman at the time and frequently wore the New York streetwear brand Supreme, known for its bold logo lettering that was then the not-so-secret handshake telegraphing street cool.

Herron wanted to engage in that culture by wearing the brand. “It signified so much more than just a T-shirt,” Herron says. “But I definitely could not afford it. So I asked my mom if she could buy me one.” Karen Herron was an entrepreneur herself, a registered nurse who started a hospice services company, and she cast a jaundiced eye on rank consumerism. She told him, “Rather than invest in these other brands, you should invest in yourself.”

That idea struck Keith like a thunderbolt. “I went in the other room and started designing graphics,” he remembers.

The brand’s name came easily. “I started googling words that started with ‘A’ and came upon ‘advisory,’ ” he says. “It wasn’t anything deeper than that.” He has contemplated a rebranding from time to time, he says, but finally decided that the random, disemvoweled term really did have meaning after all. “The brand was born from advice. So it ended up being relevant,” he says, smiling. “I’m not mad at it at all.”

At school he started selling the T-shirts he designed on PowerPoint and made at home using a heat press. He had a tight circle of friends. “Sutter [Middle School] was really special because it was this melting pot of all of Sacramento,” he says. “I had friends all over the city, and we’d bike from the Pocket to Land Park to East Sac, just all over. We’d go to the Midtown Taqueria at 38th and J streets. We’d hit Vic’s Ice Cream every single Friday. There was a lot of loitering. Then in high school we’d go shoot photos or music videos all around midtown and downtown. It was honestly the best time ever.”

Early on, there were quality issues with the iron-on graphics flaking, and he was devastated when he overheard one of his childhood best friends telling other kids not to buy from him. “That broke my heart,” he says.

The silver lining is that his hurt feelings led him to turn away from selling at school (even after correcting the quality issues) and instead put his designs out there on the internet. As a result, Herron started connecting with other creators of all ages, all over the country. “And a lot of those people ended up becoming the community that we engage with to this day,” he says. While he is Advisry’s founder and creative director, Herron always uses “we” when referring to the fashion company. “The brand has always been collaborative,” he says. His primary collaborators, while not officially employed by Advisry, have been part of the unofficial crew for as long as the label has existed, and still pitch in as independent contractors when need arises for more hands on deck—like preparing for Fashion Week. Musician Glen the Saiyan and D.J. Brandon Lamont, for instance, are friends from the Sacramento school days.

Moving on from T-shirts, Herron began picking up and reworking vintage clothing from shops like Thrift Town and Eco Thrift, altering, combining and adding embellishments and hand-embroidering an Advisry logo, then selling the one-of-a-kind pieces online. While still in middle school, he started putting out lookbooks (the fashion industry’s term for a seasonal catalogue of a designer’s wares). Some of the items, he says, “I had no clue how to make.” He still challenges himself with stretch goals by asking, “What’s the next thing I don’t know how to do?”

“I always think that that’s a superpower for any self-taught creative: If you don’t know all the rules you’re not supposed to break, then who’s to say you can’t break them?” he adds.

Herron’s tipping point came one splendid spring day in 2018, when he was a senior at Rio Americano High School. He had produced a full collection of original ready-to-wear garments including a bright, bold, cobalt-blue knit cardigan covered in life-size sunflowers, like Vincent van Gogh operating a knitting machine on acid. As a photographer, he had an all-access backstage pass at the massive Sol Blume music festival in downtown’s César Chávez Plaza—his particular photographic series on Instagram at the time, which got him noticed and shared, was taking portraits of performers’ footwear, inspired by the glittery Gucci shoes he saw Steve Lacy, guitarist of the Grammy-nominated band The Internet, wear to a festival a year before. He was already on a high, because that morning he’d seen an influencer wearing the sunflower sweater. At Sol Blume, he spotted Lacy and politely asked to photograph the musician’s shoes again, then gifted him a sunflower sweater. Later that day, he was astonished to see Lacy appear wearing the sweater. “This was the first time I’d seen a performer on stage wearing my clothes. I was like, ‘This is cool, and surreal,’ ” he says. But the perfect day wasn’t over yet. That evening, he was at a party in the Pocket with friends. “Everyone’s just hanging out and it’s normal,” he recalls. “Then I look at my phone, and Tyler, the Creator is wearing the same sweater, in a video. I was in disbelief. It was wild, all this happening in one day.” The sweater was the visual equivalent of a catchy tune, simply irresistible.

Excited, he told his mom, but she didn’t know who any of these “famous” people were. Somehow, that made the weird moment of world-stage success against the backdrop of daily life in Sacramento all the more surreal. Herron says he totally related to Greta Gerwig at that moment, and the semi-autobiographical titular character in her solo directorial debut, Lady Bird. “It totally felt like my life at the time,” he says. “Greta went to Sutter [Middle School] too, and the places they shot, in the Fab 40s and McKinley Park—I used to hang out at those places and say the same things about them. It was fantastic to see that representation.”

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READ MORE: Homecoming Queen – Greta Gerwig following the breakout success of Lady Bird

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That fall, Herron, then 18, followed in Gerwig and Lady Bird’s footsteps, and moved to New York, enrolling at Fordham University. At the beginning of his college career, he discovered Blu-ray discs and started a habit he maintains to this day, of watching at least one movie from the canon of greats per day. “I became a cinephile,” he says. His eclectic pantheon of classics ranges from The Wizard of Oz  to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours  to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. As organically as the pursuit of fashion had arisen for Herron, he felt like he needed and wanted to approach film studies more formally. But then, with Advisry taking off, he decided to take a gap year at the start of 2020 and contemplated dropping out of school altogether to focus on fashion.

Around this time, he had another stroke of good fortune. To this day, Herron isn’t sure how or why his father came to possess Antoine Phillips’ business card, but he assumes it’s the result of his parent’s tireless networking—like his entrepreneurial mom, his dad has managed dual careers, founding an educational training company while working full-time for CalTrans. But however he came by it, Keith Sr. passed the contact info for Gucci’s then-VP of brand and culture engagement to his son in March of 2020. Even as pandemic lockdowns were called and Keith Jr. temporarily fled crowded New York to rejoin his mom at her relatively safer home in the Pocket area, he reached out.

Phillips—one of the too-few Black executives in fashion—had recently been hired by the luxury brand with a specific goal of bringing more talented people of color into Gucci’s orbit. Herron was a promising intern candidate, but Phillips didn’t like that he was contemplating quitting school. “He basically told me, ‘If you stay in school, I’ll make you my intern,’ ” says Herron, who readily agreed to continue his studies. In addition to a coveted spot in Gucci’s internship program, Phillips also gave the young film buff an assignment, to add fashion documentaries to his watch list.

Among the first few Herron watched, the one that spoke to him the most was a 2007 documentary about Marc Jacobs, another precocious talent who began designing in high school then went on to become creative director of Louis Vuitton, collaborating with artists like Pharrell, Sofia Coppola and Takashi Murakami, before leaving to fully focus on his own brand. Learning about Jacobs’ career trajectory, it all clicked. “That was resonant with me, because he was combining all these different cultural elements,” Herron says. This, he remembers thinking, is “exactly what I want to be doing.”

So, in August 2020, despite Manhattan still being partially closed down due to Covid-19, taking away the hope of an on-site internship, Herron moved back to New York to work on a full fall collection. The range of accepted formats for runway shows and events like Fashion Week had changed—due to the pandemic, most collections were being recorded on film instead of presented live. Seeing what other designers were putting together, Herron was inspired to combine his interests.

“I had all these friends, and I’d made all this stuff, so I grabbed 40 or 50 friends and we headed to Forest Park in Queens, and I directed a film,” he says. The premise was a surreal fantasy: Herron sat in the pristine woods, designing clothing on his laptop, and then models (all artists, musicians, photographers and filmmakers) seemingly came to life, emerging from the sylvan woods to walk a forest path that served as the “runway.” There was very little sleight of hand, but the film plays as if the designs are being conjured into life straight out of Herron’s imagination. It’s a simple but breathtaking conceit, and very filmic.

Herron spent $3,000 for the show—the biggest budget he’d ever had for any project—publishing the video of his collection online that November. He called the collection “Thoughts Become Things” because “it felt like the universe was conspiring for that intention to become reality.” And in a way it was. Much to Herron’s astonishment, the film attracted major attention, including from the Council of Fashion Designers of America—the very group that organizes New York Fashion Week every season—who sent out a news blast about the Advisry video and the designer behind it. “It was so random. I had done the show and then four days later my phone was blowing up,” Herron says. “It was like the pandemic gave me the breath of fresh air to pause and set the intention. From there, it was snowballing.”

In August 2021, the former Gucci intern became one of 22 young designers of color to be named to that year’s class of Gucci Changemakers Scholars, which exposed him to a whole new level of mentorship at Gucci.

Phillips remembers their weekly phone meetings in the course of the remote program. “I was impressed with his POV, his creativity, his authenticity,” says Phillips, who has since moved on from Gucci and recently served as the head of VIP and influencer relations at Chanel North America. “He’s very clear on what his generation wants, what they’re looking for, but he walks to the beat of his own drum. Advisry is stuff you can wear, but it doesn’t look like anything else out there.”

As one of the first Black executives for a luxury fashion brand, Phillips took a special interest in Herron that continues to this day. “It’s developed into a really easy, fun, thoughtful friendship,” he says. “I mean, I’m 44 and Keith is 25, but we learn from each other. This past weekend we had coffee, and we were just brainstorming.”

Herron received one-on-one mentoring from other top-level executives up and down the Gucci organizational chart. “That’s when I learned about merchandising,” he says. He had calls with Marco Bizzarri, then-CEO of Gucci worldwide, and Susan Chokachi, then-CEO of Gucci Americas.

“If the CEO of Gucci knows my name,” Herron says, “that’s proof this is possible. I can do this.”

When Herron moved back to New York, his ride-or-die Sacramento crew reassembled—some were already in the city, others arrived out for the first time. “Five of us, all from Sacramento, moved into this apartment in SoHo,” he says. They started hosting small gatherings on their building’s rooftop, with Herron sometimes DJing. As pandemic protocols eased over the course of 2021, the parties got bigger, and the city’s young creatives showed up in droves, including stars like A$AP Rocky and Rihanna.

Those hordes of new friends are what led him to be tapped to move into the WSA building, and to finally start showing his clothes in live runway shows at New York Fashion Week.

Today, Herron’s film ambitions are growing right alongside his fashion brand. He has directed music videos for his girlfriend, New Zealand pop star and actress Benee, and styled her looks for her 2025 tour opening for Canadian multihyphenate Tate McRae. He just finished co-designing costumes for Ruby, an independent feature film that wrapped shooting in upstate New York in August and stars Jack Dylan Grazer and Jaeden Martell, who previously appeared together in the 2017 horror blockbuster It. He plans someday to direct movies, like Tom Ford, the designer who turned Gucci into a fresh fashion powerhouse in the last century and directed and wrote two Oscar-nominated films—A Single Man  (2006) and Nocturnal Animals  (2009)—in this one. The idol who inspires Herron most, however, is the late Kobe Bryant, who won an Academy Award for producing the animated short Dear Basketball, which he also wrote.

Herron was so Kobe-obsessed that he didn’t tune into the Sacramento Kings until Bryant retired, although now he’s all in, and even did a collab with the hometown team in 2023 titled “City of Trees,” which included lovingly decorated varsity jackets with hand-designed emblems for neighborhoods that were part of his personal history, like midtown, the Pocket and Land Park, and other locally themed patches, like those for the “City of Trees” water tower and the “Light the Beam” chant. (Advisry and the Kings teamed up again this season to roll out a new hoodie version.) Kings star Malik Monk—GQ  magazine’s reigning “most stylish NBA player”—touted the item made by his “close friend” on sports media platform Playmaker HQ, saying “Got to show love to Sacramento,” and wore different versions of it on game days. Herron directed a TV ad for the collab that’s a cinematic, dewy-lensed short film following a multiethnic group of middle schoolers biking around the city—a heart-on-sleeve love letter from Herron to his hometown.

If you spot someone around town wearing Advisry, chances are they bought the piece at one of the pop-up shops the brand has opened in downtown Sacramento during the holidays over the past six years, where past-season looks go for a substantial discount and sales benefit organizations like the Sacramento Food Bank. (Advisry will be taking a break from the event in 2025 due to lack of bandwidth from producing and rolling out the new fall/winter collection at an unusually fast clip, but expect the pop-up to, well, pop back up in 2026.) Herron’s goal with the temporary stores is to give Sacramentans the opportunity to feel like a special part of the Advisry community. To him, that includes kids growing up in Sacramento—and because of his commitment to showing and selling locally, at youth-friendly prices that are up to 75% off retail, tweens and teens won’t have to ask their moms to buy a shirt for them, but can instead ride their bikes to the pop-up with just their saved-up allowance.

His motivation hasn’t changed much since he was a kid in Sacramento. “The goal is to be for other people what I was looking for growing up.”

Streetwear, Herron says, functions like an inside joke for the wearers. It’s a way for like-minded souls to find each other. “That’s the community aspect,” he says. “If you walk around a city somewhere, and you see someone else wearing Advisry, it’s an instant point of connection.”

Other brands have sensed how connected Herron is to youth sensibilities, and have tapped him for collaborations. In addition to the Kings, he has done a series of collabs with Adidas, with co-branded sweaters and tracksuits, and one with Ugg. He has even partnered with Quaker Oats to create items for a Cap’n Crunch treasure hunt giveaway inside the Crunch Verse augmented-reality web game.

And Herron has continued to dress his heroes—Stevie Wonder wore a pair of custom Advisry suits on his 2024 “Sing Your Song” tour. Meanwhile, Warriors star Steph Curry has done multiple pregame tunnel walks wearing Advisry, including a full denim ensemble as part of his 2023 collaboration with the Black in Fashion Council and shopping platform Rakuten to help elevate young Black designers. And Emmy-winning actress-writer Lena Waithe—who broke onto the Hollywood scene as one of the stars and scribes of the hit Netflix series Master of None—vibed so much with his 2020 collection, she used his clothing in her Showtime television series The Chi.

The morning after the fall 2025 fashion show, Herron and his crew are back at work by 10 a.m. It’s a Saturday, so they take a break for brunch on Orchard Street in the bustling Dimes Square neighborhood, near Herron’s SoHo apartment. On the corner of Orchard and Broome, the designer is recognized by a streetwear-sporting New Yorker. That’s starting to happen more and more. “Congratulations on the show,” the passerby says—implying that word has gotten around about it. “Thank you,” Herron answers.

After finding out that the first-choice destination was closed for brunch, and the second was too long a wait, the group settles for a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant that has good food and an even more important feature—a table with power outlets. Herron and lookbook photographer Amir Hossain both bring laptops and barely look up from them, focused on getting the 75 images that will comprise the collection’s lookbook curated, processed (colors corrected, wrinkled backgrounds smoothed) and ready to distribute to buyers on Monday. “We’re just going to edit while we talk, if that’s OK,” Herron says. He’s in the flow state, but just as calm as he’d been amid the preshow chaos of the day before.

Rounding out the brunch group are three childhood friends: Jordan Hunter, who grew up down the street from Herron in the Pocket—they’ve known each other since preschool; Glen the Saiyan (who prefers to go by his stage name, derived from a warrior species from the Dragon Ball Z  universe), who grew up in College Greens and met Herron in the fifth grade; and Brandon Lamont, the latecomer who joined the squad in ninth grade. Today, Herron and Lamont are roommates, while Glen lives with a girlfriend in Brooklyn, and Hunter flew in from L.A., where he’s a content programming manager at Hulu. The four friends rode their bikes together, back in those misty memory days in Sacramento, like the kids in Stranger Things—except instead of battling evil monsters, they were building a business.

By high school, the friends had rented an office space in the Pocket for Advisry, where they would gather after class to pack up orders while Lamont spun tunes—halcyon days, they reminisce, a harbinger of the now. Today Lamont curates Advisry-branded playlists on Spotify with Herron while Glen is a creative jack of all trades, pitching in as needed. (Missing from the weekend crew is Jared Hook, whom Herron met when he was 12. Hook now helps manage operations for Advisry and was at the show, but couldn’t make brunch.)

“It was wild,” Glen says. “Whenever we were together, we created, working on clothes, music.”

“I think that’s why the Advisry brand is so symbiotic,” Herron interjects. “The actual creative process was so intertwined with everything that we were all doing. It always felt like one project.”

“It was cool,” Lamont says, “us all being Black kids.”

“We just stuck together,” Glen says. “There’s no egos. We all help each other.”

“We’ve made sacrifices for each other,” Herron says. “If you really care about art, then you want to see art win.” Everyone around the table nods, as he sums it all up with a simple declaration: “It’s all about the art. Art will always prevail.”

They all nod thoughtfully, the group a living embodiment of the proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

The noodles and curries consumed, the group slowly disbands, Hunter to the airport, Glen back to Brooklyn, Lamont to his music studio around the corner, while Herron and Hossain head back to the apartment to finish their work. No one says goodbye. That sense of “we,” of that Sacramento community Herron spoke so eloquently about creating, is so strong that they never feel apart, almost as if they carry their own private Sacramento everywhere they go, from Times Square to L.A. to who knows where next. And although the future feels like it’s coming fast—all indications are that Keith Herron is going to go very, very far.