Living the
Anna Sui
Fantasy

There's always something that sparks an idea for a collection, anything from hearing a new song, reading a book, or seeing a movie. For the show last February, I was sitting watching television with my dad, and there was an old Busby Berkeley movie on. He was a choreographer in the ‘30s. I loved seeing all the girls in their rehearsal outfits. I started looking at pictures of old film stars and looking at Antonio Lopez from the ‘70s. As I'm doing that, I'm researching fabrics, deciding on color palettes. I'm working on prints, working on sweater designs, on embroidery. Everything builds into a wall of inspiration. It's very systematic, with color stories in panels for every delivery, and there’s a separate theme per panel. My collaborators, like Pat [McGrath], come to the board, and will decide where to then take it. The wall gives guidance to everybody.

It's very organic. I recently worked with Batsheva [Hay], and I had always heard about her because we had a lot of mutual friends. She came to visit me because she had some questions about textiles or contractors. By the end of that conversation, I said that we should do a collaboration together. Other times people approached me and they have a specific idea they want me to collaborate on. I love designing everything and I'm very limited as far as what I can design because we have a little studio here and then we pretty much make all the clothes within the neighborhood. I love being able to branch out.

Yeah, that was exciting, that first men’s collection that I did. He happened to be hosting Saturday Night Live and his stylist called—he ended up wearing my clothes on the show.

It was honestly a whim, because my last fall collection was inspired by a TV show called Ready Steady Go!, which was all about the British Invasion and the bands that had their debuts then. It was so fun watching that footage and I was inspired by the mod look. My vision for the show and the video was to have a band onstage, and you had to have guys in the band, too.

My favorite period was glam rock. I love that Keith [Richards] always wore Anita Pallenberg’s clothes, and Mick [Jagger] wore Bianca’s beaded jacket. So I designed menswear with that in mind, and maybe that was the reason people weren’t buying it initially. It was a little too feminine or they didn’t get it because it wasn’t classic menswear. But I still did it, with matching jackets and the same pants for girls and guys.

When we did The World of Anna Sui exhibition [in 2017]. I had never even looked at the archives. They just went in a box and I never saw the box again. When we had to figure out what outfits we were going to put on display, suddenly we were pulling out all the boxes. I remember my longtime assistant, Thomas Miller, went to London to set up the exhibition. He called me crying, and he said, “Anna, you can't believe how beautiful this looks. It just brings back so many memories,” and it was the same feeling I got when I walked in the room. We never realized how much work we did. You're always working on the next show. You don’t even think about it again, it just kind of disappears. There were so many I hadn’t even thought about, and I can’t find those fabrics anymore. It’s emotional.

You know, there's been that whole internet blow-up of the 1998 fall collection. People came back to me and asked me what that was all about. My memory is that when I was in seventh grade, I did a book report on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I loved that book. I loved the fantasy of walking through this closet and going to another world. My teacher gave me an A minus because she said, “Anna, you're too old to read fairy tales.” That stuck in my gut for a long time, and I decided to make it into a collection. I also happened to see an incredible exhibition at the V&A in London about Victorian fairy tale artists like Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, and Walter Crane. Those were the images I put on the board.
I was trying to capture that kind of beauty—something with a transporting quality, but with something sinister going on in the background. There was a spookiness to it.

When I started I did a lot of freelance. I was working in Italy, where I had to fly back and forth every two weeks. It was exhausting but got me ready for globalization. I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t know the market, I didn’t know how to find fabrics, but I ended up doing three different collections there, for seven years. You should take every opportunity that makes sense, as long as you physically can. You never know what door is going to open.
When I had the opportunity in Japan, it was so exciting. There were a lot of different presentations on how it could work, and the one that made the most sense was having a retail partner and distribution deal. I got 11 licenses, one of them being cosmetics, which is still one of my biggest licenses today. You have to weigh out your options and not be dissuaded by obstacles. And say again: Why not?

Of course. Especially today, there’s so many questions about growing up Asian, being a woman, having a business with no big backer behind it. With all these things—I found a way. I never used these things as an excuse to not try something. When I first started, I went to the bank to talk to a banker about a loan. And he said to me, “When is your dad coming in to sign for this?” I asked what he had to do with it, and walked out. I figured out another way, by freelancing rather than getting a loan. My theory is to never take no for an answer, to always get somebody else on the phone, always ask a question a different way. It may not be the easy way. But there is always another one.

They’ve been to every show since the beginning, until my dad was too unwell to come. My mom continued to come after my father passed away. It’s been special. Initially my mom asked why I wanted to be a dressmaker. But they got it when they saw the first show. And my dad knew every press person, maybe even better than me. He chatted with them, and he loved the whole process.

I’m so lucky that my nieces have all been working with me, too. They grew up coming to the fashion shows. Isabelle is my assistant and in charge of social media, Jeannie Cassandra has done all the videos and photography for me, Chase has been in a lot of the ads. It’s been fun having them onboard.

That’s an easy one. The day of the show!