Anna Sui Knows What the Girlies Want
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A few days before her Fall 2024 runway show, designer Anna Sui sits me down inside her purple-walled studio and shows me some new T-shirts, which are re-creations of shirts she made in the ’90s.
I sheepishly admit I’ve already seen them. “On Olivia Rodrigo?” she asks. Well, yes—but not just on her. Gen Z has Anna Sui on the brain. I’m thinking about my friends and myself and the fervid fashion fans I have parasocial relationships with online. We’ve all exchanged tips for finding the best vintage Anna Sui tees on Etsy, because that’s about as close to a time machine to the ’90s New York fashion scene—I’ll never apologize for romanticizing it!—as we’re going to get.
Sui understands. “That’s just how people dress now … they’re incorporating so much vintage into their wardrobe!” That’s why she included actual vintage elements in her new collection. “I thought that would be a really fun way to style the collection, instead of just trying to make it look vintage. You can’t compete with how beautifully embroidered those things were back then! It’s such a treasure.”
She worked with one of her favorite vintage sellers, Eveliina Vintage, who provided a selection of nightgowns, slipdresses, and lingerie, some dyed vibrant oranges and yellows. And she sourced vintage tapestry and chenille brocade handbags and souvenir London scarves on Etsy, eBay, and Poshmark.
The collection is further inspired by the past thanks to Sui’s obsession with Agatha Christie’s fantastic broad-brim-hat-wearing detective Miss Marple, the subject of a recent binge-watch, the designer says. “I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna do that for my collection.’”
She also watched 2021 drama The Colour Room, about Clarice Cliff, a real-life English potter in the 1920s and ’30s who made ceramics for the emerging new class of working women. “It was the first time they had pottery and dishes that were their style, rather than grandma style,” Sui says. “There’s a very art deco sort of look to it, and it gave us the direction for all the prints that we did.”
And that led her to do more research, this time on the English countryside, “where the Bloomsbury people had all these great houses and they painted all their walls and each other. That’s where I got my color palette. Also, I loved all the book covers that they were doing! They were hand-drawing those, too.”
The hand-dyed Miss Marple slipdress vintage Anna Sui fever dream looks just as psychedelic as it always has, with tweeds in curry and tobacco and marmalade, and plaid kilts and blazers like those country gentlemen would wear with Fair Isle sweaters—of which there are also many at her show, and hand-knit to boot. There is even needlepoint. Everything is styled with argyle socks and pointed winklepicker shoes by John Fluevog. “It’s kinda quirky … like how the English dress!” Sui says.
But it’s also absolutely how more and more young people are dressing right now, with vintage pieces they found at the flea market mixed in with investment staples by their favorite designer, which they saved for weeks to afford. The show itself takes place in the rare-books room at the Strand, with a Sonic Youth playlist. Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola sit side by side, and I have the pleasure of sitting across the aisle, watching them tap their ballet flats together in excited unison as every look passes. Off to the side is Sui’s niece, actor Chase Sui Wonders, who inspired one of the final looks: a studded velvet dress layered over a graphic long-sleeved T-shirt.
“We had done this in the ’90s,” Sui has told me of the dress in question, “and we found the material again at a different printer. I was so excited because one of my nieces was wearing her mom’s version of it at Christmastime. I thought, ‘We have to find that again.’”
When I see it walk down the runway, I notice Sui Wonders snapping a photo with her phone, as two seatmates lean in to tell me, “I want that!”
And I say, “Me too!” But I’m not surprised. Anna Sui just knows what the girls want.
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