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«Anna Sui
Anna Sui's singularity lies in her skill to weave her own passions into her work. Her creations are complicated pastiches of vintage eras and significant nods to music and popular culture - from '60s Portobello to downtown rockers and B-Boys. Her love of style began early. Rising up in a sleepy suburb of Detroit, Sui (born 1955) spent her days styling her dolls and collating her 'genius files', a source book of magazine clippings that she continues to reference nowadays.
In 1972, she began studying at Parsons School of Design in New York, where she became a usual on the underground punk scene and where she met photographer Steven Meisel, a long-time friend and coworker. Sui spent the residue of the '70s designing for a string of sportswear companies. Then, in 1980, she presented a six-piece collection at the Boutique Show, getting an immediate order from Macy's.
Sui made her runway debut correct in 1991; the collection was a critically-acclaimed respect to her heroine, Coco Chanel. And by the early '90s, her self-consciously maximalist look was helping to cover the way for designers like Marc Jacobs, sparking a revival in the New York fashion scene. During 1993, she won the CFDA Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent. At the present time, Sui has stores in New York, LA, Tokyo and Osaka, and has added denim, sportswear, shoes and accessories to her brand. Her kitsch cosmetics and best-selling fragrances, with distinctive rose-embossed packaging, have all helped to establish her as a significant designer and shrewd business woman with an eccentric spirit and limitless sense of fun.
Calvin Klein»
It's hard to imagine a young Francisco Costa rising up in the small Brazilian town where he was born (even to a family already rooted in fashion) and having even a suspicion of the career he has now - a career which, in some ways, is only just preliminary. In the early '90s, the little and cherubic immigrant arrived in New York as bright-eyed in the big city as any who had come before. He set about learning English and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he won the design Como/Young Designers of America award.
After commencement, he was recruited to design dresses and knits for Bill Blass. But fate soon swept Costa towards his primary big break when Oscar de la Renta asked him to manage the signature and Pink Label collections of his own high-society house, plus Pierre Balmain haute dressmaking and ready-to-wear. In 1998, at Tom Ford's bidding, Costa decamped for the red-hot Gucci studio where he served as senior designer of eveningwear, a position in which he was charged with creating the custom designs for together high-rolling clients and high-profile celebrities. This is where Costa cut his teeth, acquiring the skills necessary to direct a major label, as he would soon do, recurring to New York in 2002 to work for Calvin Klein.
When Calvin Klein stepped down in 2003, Italo Zucchelli assumed the position of design director of the brand's menswear collections, following four seasons functioning directly with Klein. The spring/summer 2004 collection, shown in 2003, was Zucchelli's first. Zucchelli is a graduate of the Polimoda School of Fashion Design in Florence (1988), though he also previously attended courses for two years at the Architecture University, also in Florence
«Donna Karan
While she was still a student at the Parsons School of Design in New York, Long Island native Donna Karan was accessible a summer job assisting Anne Klein. After three years as associate designer, Karan was named as Klein's successor and, subsequent her mentor's death in 1974, Karan became head of the company. After a decade at Anne Klein, where she recognized a reputation for practical luxury sportswear separates, classically in stretch fabrics and dark hues, Karan founded her own company in 1984 with her late husband, Stephan Weiss. A year later, her highly acclaimed Donna Karan New York Collection, based around the idea of 'seven easy pieces', unveiled the bodysuit that was to become her trademark. Karan's stress on simple yet complicated designs, including everything from wrap skirts to corseted eveningwear, captured the popular mood of 'body consciousness' that swept Hollywood in the '80s. By 1989, she had expanded this attitude to the street-smart dispersal line DKNY.
In 1992, inspired by the wish to dress her husband, a menswear line was launched. Since then, Donna Karan International has continued to diversify and expand to wrap every age and lifestyle, including children’s range, eyewear, fragrances and home furnishings. She has been honoured with an extraordinary seven CFDA awards, including 2004's Lifetime Achievement Award to agree with her 20th anniversary. The company became a publicly-traded venture in 1996 and was acquired by French luxury conglomerate LVMH in 2001 for a reported 643 million US$. Karan leftovers the chief designer.
Tommy Hilfiger»
Tommy Hilfiger was born one of nine kids in 1951 in Elmira, New York. His eponymous product is often viewed as epitomising the American Dream. His career notably began in 1969 with $150 and 20 pairs of jeans. When customers to his People's Palace store in upstate New York failed to find what they were after, he took to scheming clothes himself, with no previous training. In 1984, he moved to New York City and launched his initial collection under his own name. With his characteristic red, white and blue logo and collegiate/Ivy League influences, Hilfiger obtainable a preppy vision of Americana which, coupled with his looser sportswear aesthetic, found an astonishing new audience in the growing hip-hop scene of the early '90s.
Hilfiger, a devoted music fan himself, welcomed this re-interpretation of his work, but rumours that he was fewer than enamoured by his new audience led him to create an estimable response, lending his hold up to the Anti-Defamation League and the Washington DC Martin Luther King Jr National Memorial Project Foundation. By 1993 his corporation had gone public and Hilfiger was named the CPDA's Menswear Designer of the Year in 1995. A new 'semi-luxe' line of tailored separates, entitled simply 'H', was launched in 2004 as a higher-priced, more up market addition to the worldwide brand, which now incorporates all from denim and eyewear to fragrances, homeware, sporting clothing and children's lines.
In maintenance with his music and fashion influences, Hilfiger chose to market his new 'grown-up' range by asking David Bowie and Iman to emerge in ad campaigns for H. In December 2004 Hilfiger looked set on more expansion when he announced an agreement made with Karl Lagerfeld to internationally distribute the latter's own-label collections.