Christina Yu

From Litigation to Handbags

Christina Yu's career change is the sharpest in this section: born in Hong Kong, she was a practicing litigator at the law firm Baker & McKenzie there, relocated to Hanoi, Vietnam, with her husband in 1995, and within two years had created a handbag label exported worldwide. The route ran through other people's labels first — she developed private-label work for international labels such as Shanghai Tang, G.O.D. and Anteprima — before creating her own label, Ipa-Nima, at a time when fashion handbags were not made in Vietnam. That last fact is the business idea: a product category absent from a country with the craftsmen to make it. Since April 1997 Ipa-Nima has been exported worldwide, and in addition Yu still designs for private-label clients worldwide, keeping the wholesale work that preceded the label alongside the label itself.

Building an Export Market for Vietnamese Workmanship

The definition credits Yu with more than a brand: within a few years she single-handedly developed an export market that celebrates Vietnamese workmanship and creates opportunities for Vietnamese craftsmen and manufacturers. The claim is structural — before Ipa-Nima, fashion handbags were not made in Vietnam; after it, Vietnamese-made handbags were sold across the world under a designer's name and through private-label channels. A litigator's skills are not irrelevant to that achievement: export markets are built from contracts, distribution arrangements and client relationships as much as from product, and Yu arrived in Hanoi with a decade-scale legal training in exactly those instruments, applied from 1995 onward to bags rather than briefs.

Clients and Coverage

The recognition recorded is of two kinds. The celebrity client list is long and specific — Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, HRH Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, Shakira Caine, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Braxton, Yasmin Le Bon, Rebecca Gayheart, Sherilyn Fenn, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Cate Blanchett, Jill Hennessy, Renee Fleming, Denise Rich, Kelly Osbourne, Martha Stewart, Bai Ling, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung and Faye Wong — spanning politics, royalty, film and music across America, Europe and Asia. The magazine list matches it: Vogue, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Marie Claire, InStyle, Glamour and others. For a label founded in Hanoi in 1997 in a category the country did not previously produce, that breadth of named wearers and coverage is the definition's evidence that the export market she built reached the top of the fashion market, not only its wholesale middle.