Obsessed with style.

Age 6: Sylvia moves back to the US after three years in Nairobi.
Age 12: Sylvia sends sketches to Calvin Klein, looking for work as a designer. She gets a nice letter that suggests she finish school first.
Age 17: Sylvia moves to New York for college, where she "majors in nightlife."
Age 18: Sylvia is doing the windows at Bergdorf's and making jewelry out of resin and scrap metal for her club friends.
Age 19: At a club one night, a Bendel's buyer likes Sylvia's handmade coat and orders several. That same year, Anna Wintour writes Sylvia up in New York Magazine. Sylvia leaves college to focus on making and selling clothes. (So much for nice letters.)

Sylvia Heisel has always been obsessed with style, art, and design. She came of age in a New York where revolutionary fashion upheavals were closing the Uptown-Downtown gap. No surprise then that Sylvia's clothes have long embodied both classic luxury and high-style global modernism. You'll find sumptuous raw silks in her line, but they're often in acid colors, and right next to vintage upholstery fabrics, startlingly futuristic textures and ornaments, and other surprises.

And she's always open to a challenge. She dressed Madonna for the all-star period musical "Bloodhounds of Broadway," and later worked with art star Matthew Barney on the costumes for his first "Cremaster" films and artworks. But it was her much-discussed Kevlar evening gown, a simple yet arresting vision in bulletproof yellow polymer, that best predicted her current direction.

"Fashion should enhance our lives and surround us with beauty," says Sylvia, who's been a CFDA member since 1997. Her designs have long done both, merging clean, modern lines with lavish details. Now she's added sustainability and a focus on technology to the mix, reconceiving her line to embrace these principles and the materials they've made possible.

Sylvia is serious about closing the gap between day and night. As she writes on her blog: "We're wearing evening clothes less often but going out as much as ever." Look for new directions in eveningwear.

Thanks to her childhood in Africa, Turkish heritage, and love of travel, Sylvia continues to bring a transcultural perspective to clothes, inspired by input from a world growing smaller, faster, flatter.