Productions. Career Monah Li began her career as a teenager making her own clothes in Vienna. Her dresses attracted attention and were bought by boutiques in her hometown and in Düsseldorf, Germany. One of the only female students to have attended the prestigious Higher Teaching Institute Industries in Austria, she graduated from textile engineering school with honors at age nineteen. Though accepted into Karl Lagerfeld's class at the Academy for Applied Art in Vienna, Li chose to pursue her career after her hand painted silk garments received a write up in German Vogue, before moving to Los Angeles where her psychiatrist mother was living to attend the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. After a brief stint in Los Angeles where her growing drug use distracted her from school, Monah Li returned to Vienna, where she was hospitalized for addiction. As part of her rehab program, she went to work in a garment shop owned by the rehab's head of psychiatry, learning "couture' from the seamstresses who also worked there. After leaving the rehab program, she opened her own boutique in Vienna, winning the Best Designer of 1988 Award from the Austrian Wool Secretary. Monah Li then returned to Los Angeles, and after her first successful dress design was knocked off, founded her own company and began to create unique, one of-a-kind hand sewn garments, up-cycling vintage slips, dress and sweaters with lace insets, lingerie fastening and straps, which she then over-dyed. Finding success through sales to trend-setting retailers like Fred Segal, she opened a boutique on Vermont Avenues, which stocked her signature X-dress and other styles. The shop was described as one of "the best new stores in the city," and was credited with turning Vermont Avenue, the main street in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, into a hip shopping destination. She rallied a group of other local designers and founded the Coalition of Los Angeles Designers in 1998; the group is now defunct, but while active, staged fashion shows and worked to bring awareness about innovative Los Angeles clothing to a wider audience. In 1998 Monah Li was nominated as California Mart Rising Star. In 2000, Monah Li added perfume she designed and created to her boutique, and branched out into large scale manufacturing of her designs for department stores. Unfortunately, a production contractor "did such shoddy work that stores nationwide returned the merchandise," costing her