This Week's Most Wanted

Loeffler Randall x SUNO lace-up wedge, $645, loefflerrandall.com

Suno Fall 2010

warm fall colors   a mix of ethnic prints  

all about the mini dress

 

photos: Thomas Iannacconne (Women's Wear Daily)

Suno Resort 2010

Five minutes with Max Osterweis (another Mrs. Obama fave)

By Sarah Haight from "W Editor's Blog"

Portrait: Sarah Elliott
Count Max Osterweis among the handful of young designers whose careers have been kick-started by Michelle Obama. The San Francisco native and former screenwriter, 34, started his clothing line, Suno, last year, a culmination of many years of travel to Kenya's Lamu Island, where his mother has a retreat ("she went on a safari and didn't come home," says Osterweis, who named the line after his mom). Using traditional Kenyan textiles and local seamstresses, Osterweis has created an ethnic and entirely modern collection. The basis of the line is the fabric—the bolts of printed cloth called kangas—which African women buy in pairs to wear, for instance, as a dress and baby-sling, or a skirt and headscarf, even as pajamas that they share with their partners. One of those kangas, made into a blouse, turned up on the First Lady at an event in his hometown last spring.

You worked in film up until about two years ago—how did you make the leap to designer?

The first time I went to Kenya I just started collecting them. I was thinking about making some skirts and dresses for my girlfriend, who had seen the kangas. I said, "Oh, yeah I'll make you something," but never got around to it. And then I was thinking about doing something in Kenya and the post- election violence in 2007. I think that at a certain point when I thought about making 50 or 60 dresses for friends, it turned out that it was going to cost me a lot of money. So I thought maybe I should make 150 of them and sell half of them. And then, it still didn't make any sort of financial sense, so I thought, I should actually take a leap and try and start a business. I'd just finished working on a script, and had some time on my hands.

A Look from Suno fall 2009.
What has been the biggest challenge?

There are lots. Initially we used two little workshops [in Kenya]... and [one] didn't have a generator, there were regular power outages. So made the decision to turn that workshop into a cutting factory. The other workshop was started by an Irishwoman who had been a costumer for the Royal Opera in London. She married a man in Kenya and moved there and started training tailors the day she got there. Since we started with her, she's now built a second workshop on her grounds to accommodate us and has more than doubled her workforce.

These kangas have sayings written on them, correct?

An aphorism—usually about social or sexual politics. And women will buy them based on the aphorism, rather than the print. Like... "There's a new hen in town, watch your roosters." And one I chose for Spring 2010 is, "A ripe mango is best eaten slowly." So they're usually messages from women to men, or from women to other women, and in Swahili.

Who are the people behind these aphorisms?

I think they're mostly men. Because I have yet to meet a female factory owner for kangas.

Michelle Obama wore one of your shirts this spring—was that a surprise?

Well, we brought the collection to Paris during the shows in February, and Ikram [Goldman of Chicago's Ikram] happened to be a friend of a very good friend of mine, so she came over to dinner. And we happened to have the collection sitting on my front couch. Ikram bought a bunch of stuff, right then and there.


So Michelle has a couple of your designs?

At this point, as far as I know, she's worn one piece. But I know [Michelle] bought 5 pieces [from Ikram], and I didn't know that until she'd actually worn something. It was kind of wonderful.

Kimberly White/GettyImages

Fashion Photography by Malik Sidibe

Shot of Malik Sadibe's photos in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured a unique fashion editorial done by famed Malian photographer Malik Sidibe. Sidibe offers a fresh perspective on the Spring 2009 collections by having his extended family, which includes his 17 sons and daughters, modeling clothing by designers like Dries van Noten, Christian Lacroix and Marc Jacobs. The way in which the lively prints and African-inspired clothing, worn by the everyday people in the portrait-style photographs, come to life, speaks to the relevance of Sidibe's style, which has remained virutally unchanged for the past several decades. In fact, his influence can be seen in the Suno Spring/Summer 2009 collection, shot by Tina Tyrell.

Photo: Malik Sidibe

Photo: Malik Sidibe

Photo: Malik Sidibe

Suno shot by Tina Tyrell

Suno, a cool new label with roots in Africa

By ERIC WILSON

NEW collection called Suno landed on the selling floor at Opening Ceremony this week, not from the runways in Bryant Park but from a factory in Nairobi, Kenya, where the apparel industry was all but decimated decades ago.

The clothes — cotton skirts, tops and shift dresses in vibrant prints — were made by Max Osterweis, a new designer who has already been flagged by Women’s Wear Daily and Style.com without even having had a show, largely because his designs are so captivating. Mr. Osterweis, a 34-year-old screenwriter and film director from San Francisco, began collecting traditional East African kangas more than a decade ago after his mother built a house on Lamu Island in Kenya.

On vacation there last year and concerned about the country’s turmoil, he decided to start Suno (named after his mother) to bring work to local factories. He commissioned about 1,000 pieces, chopping up fabrics from his textile collection so that each piece would be original, made from one or two kangas, which are similar in shape to a sarong. The factories specialized in hotel uniforms, so it took some coaxing to make the styles more contemporary.

“I felt like I wanted to do something in Kenya to help,” Mr. Osterweis said. “Ultimately I’d like to have a full collection, if we can give people jobs and raise the skill level there.”

At Opening Ceremony, his designs cost from $95 for a bikini to about $595 for a tailored jacket or dress. The prices are partly determined by the originality or rarity of the print. Some are quite traditional, with naturalistic leaf prints or paisley patterns; others more modern, like one, made into a shirtdress, that shows a blue and yellow print of cellphones and feathers.

Many of the prints are also printed with Swahili aphorisms that were originally worn to send messages to fellow villagers, like one that loosely translates as: “Watch your roosters, there’s a new hen in town.” Others are a little harder to understand, usually, Mr. Osterweis said, because they come from more modern kangas, which were made in China, where something is perhaps lost in translation.

Just imagine walking around in a skirt that says, “The day a monkey is destined to die, all trees get slippery.”