Family Affairs
Despite the increasingly corporate nature of the luxury business, three pioneering brands demonstrate the advantage of running their companies family style and keeping them close to home
IN THE TENTS AT NEW YORK Fashion Week this month, many of the spring 2007 shows will include clothes destined to be manufactured in China. It's a safe bet, though, that only one of the clothing lines will have been entirely conceived and designed in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen. That distinction belongs to Ports 1961, a newcomer to the U.S. fashion scene, whose origins redefine words like globalization and Made in China.
Ports 1961 is the brainchild of Tia Cibani, 33, a designer of Italian-Libyan parentage and Canadian citizenship whose international background and itinerant lifestyle inform the look of her eclectic and coolly modern clothes.
Like Ports itself, Cibani arrived on Seventh Avenue via a 12-year detour in China. She was 19 when she decided to join her elder sister Fiona, then a menswear designer, at a Canadian company called Ports International. The company had its heyday in the '70s and early '80s when its clothes were carried by stores like Bergdorf Goodman. But by 1989 the brand had lost some of its stature and was purchased by Alfred Chan, a Canadian entrepreneur who was born near Xiamen and raised in Hong Kong. Chan married Fiona and made the unlikely decision to move the company's operations to Xiamen and relaunch the brand to cater exclusively to the then tiny population of mainland Chinese women with the means to afford luxury clothing.
It was a visionary but risky move. Fashion was just beginning to re-emerge in China after decades of communist-mandated austerity, but the major luxury brands hadn't made inroads. A market was there for the taking, but Chan couldn't find a design team willing to stick it out in a steamy, crowded Chinese city where the foreign population numbered in the dozens and not many locals spoke English. By 1994 he had worked with a few designers, and he persuaded his wife and her younger sister to give Xiamen a six-month try. "The deal," says Fiona, "was, if we didn't like it, we'd move home." Tia, who had been attending classes at Parsons School of Design in New York City, agreed to tag along. She left behind her friends and a boyfriend, "who said I was nuts," she laughs.
At first, both sisters had doubts about the sanity of their move. Neither had ever been to China or spoke Chinese. They understood little about their customers. "Our first season, we did a forest green for fall," Fiona recalls. "Ports had been known for that British look. But people here said, 'What is that? The mailman wears that.'" Meanwhile, Tia struggled with foreign suppliers. "Although Ports had a big reputation in North America, when we came here, we would go to the suppliers and say, 'Now we need our fabrics to come to China.' And they were like, 'No, we're not sending swatches to China. What's going on in China?'"