Suno Rising: New York Post

Max Osterweis began collecting kangas — traditional colorful, cotton African textiles — while visiting his mother in Lamu, Kenya. The Brooklyn-based screenwriter was disturbed by the post-election violence in the country in the late ’00s, and decided he wanted to do something to stimulate its economy — and that kangas were a great place to start.

Osterweis joined forces with Parsons grad and Gapand Generra designer Erin Beatty, whom he knew socially, in 2008, and Suno was born. The pair went to work repurposing the patterned kanga fabrics into Suno’s first collection — 1,000 one-of-a-kind pieces, everything from skirts to pants, priced between $200 and $600.

“One of the things I felt when we started Suno was that I didn’t want it to be a charity thing,” says Osterweis, 40, an NYU film school grad who directed projects for Nike before his foray into fashion. “I wanted to create jobs and help contribute to the growing middle class in Kenya. So what we would do is train the tailors — bring professionals from (the US) to train them.”

In the last six years, Osterweis and Beatty, who are based in New York, have forged partnerships with artisans all over the world — from Peru to Japan. And they continue to create special projects out of Kenya, like a line of sneakers made of recycled rubber, from which a percentage of the profits go to charity.

Fashionable A-listers have taken notice of the worldly wares. Fans include Michelle Obama, Kate Bosworth and Lupita Nyong’o, who showed up to the CFDA Awards earlier this year in a colorfully striped, two-piece cropped pant ensemble from Suno’s fall 2014 line. Nyong’o’s look and the rest of the fall line were inspired by a fascinating female subculture.

“We found these old pictures taken by photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, who went to Romania and photographed the Roma gypsy tribes in the early ’90s and then again in 2006,” Beatty, 35, says. “Between that time, they had accumulated all this wealth selling scrap metal. They were crazy gypsy, but all of a sudden they had a glitz-a-rama, rave style.”

The intricate embroidery on the separates was done in India, and the soft knits were actually created in Romania. The fall collection is available at 50 retailers worldwide, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Opening Ceremony and Fivestory.

While their signature kanga aesthetic put Osterweis and Beatty on the map, they continue to develop their style to defy expectations.

“We have this niche, where people expect us to play with new techniques and fabrications,” says Beatty, 35. “That is what pushes us forward.”

Check out my full article from the New York Post here: Suno

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