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.”