Sister Act

By Susan Jakes/Xiamen

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?'"

If work was hard, adjusting to life was even harder. Social life, Tia recalls, meant seeing "the same 10 people over and over." The sisters flew to Hong Kong at least once a month just to buy groceries. But major moves had become something of a specialty for them. They had left Libya for Vancouver as young girls, and it wasn't long before the Cibanis adapted to their trial-by-fire China immersion. Ports International grew into the perfect hybrid of foreign cachet and local sensibility that Chinese woman craved. Many customers believed that the clothes they were buying at Ports' growing chain of stores were imported. Chan's marketers encouraged that perception, using high-profile models like Kate Moss and Claudia Schiffer in their ad campaigns. Ports had obvious advantages over competition from other foreign luxury brands: it was less expensive and had much wider distribution. But its real assets were the intangibles the Cibanis picked up by living in and traveling around China. "We gained an amazing experience from being here, with the economy growing the way it was and the local people and the evolution they were going through," says Tia. "And that's why I felt like, 'This season I can do bandeau tops,' because I was here living right along with them, and I saw the girls in the office, what they were willing to accept from one season to the next."

Today women's fashion, Ports and the Cibanis are fixtures in China. Ports International, which Fiona has designed since Tia branched off to launch the 1961 line four years ago, has some 300 stores selling its classically feminine clothes to a loyal clientele of business executives and wives of government officials. Tia's line is targeted mainly at customers in North America and is carried by Saks and smaller boutiques, like Curve, in Los Angeles.

Stepping into their atelier at the Ports headquarters in Xiamen feels like transcontinental travel. Outside, hawkers are selling bowls of noodles in front of a ramshackle warren of storefronts. The air is sweltering, and amid a sea of Chinese faces, not a single foreigner appears. Inside, the sisters work with some 35 foreign designers, dressed as if ready for a night out in New York City. Fiona, in a blousy navy silk jacket and sky-high heels, balances an Hermes Birkin in the crook of her arm as she makes adjustments on samples of raincoats. Tia, in a silvery bolero thrown over a gray cotton tank and white pants, is finishing up a resort collection inspired by Lulamae Barnes, the poor Southern child bride who goes on to become Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Bouquets of spearmint from Fiona's garden adorn drafting tables, and the staff members' afternoon snack consists of cupcakes, iced expertly in shocking pink by Fiona's daughter Bella. It's hard to imagine how an ordinary Xiamen resident would react if he or she walked into the studio by accident.

But Xiamen has rediscovered its cosmopolitan roots. The city has a tradition of international trade that dates back centuries. More recently, companies like Kodak and Dell have set up shop. Fiona can send her kids to an international school, and the sisters dine out at a French restaurant where the chef is Israeli.

For Fiona, Xiamen is now home. She and Chan own a 90-year-old house on Gulangyu, an island near the city that was once the playground of the Cibanis' 19th century antecedents: Western merchants and diplomats who came in an earlier wave of globalization. The house, abandoned to an encroaching jungle in the 1950s, is an imposing Beaux Arts chateau with an elaborately terraced garden. Like the Cibanis, it's out of place in China and yet somehow perfectly at home. Fiona has spent four years restoring it to its former glory, importing Italian marble for the floors and commissioning Chinese ironwork.

Tia, for her part, is more focused on setting up a life for herself in New York City. She has a new showroom overlooking the Hudson River; the same logic that drew her to China--that living among your customers is key--means she'll be spending more time there. But walking through the twilight among Gulangyu's decayed mansions, where East and West blend with grace, she looks a bit wistful.

"I've never themed one of my collections on Xiamen's past. Our Chinese customers didn't like things that looked obviously Chinese," she says. "Now I really get to express myself. So Xiamen could become my inspiration."