Opening this Friday at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London is “The World of Anna Sui.” The show, the first retrospective of an American designer in that city, will chart Sui’s New York career. In 1991, 11 years after setting up her own business, having cut her teeth designing for junior labels on Seventh Avenue, and freelance styling for her friend Steven Meisel, the designer was persuaded to stage her first runway show, which introduced her singular world to a larger audience.
Sui’s universe, colored purple and black (her signature colors), is an enticing one in which rock rules and fun and romance are served up in large doses. “My clothes are about nostalgia and memories of my own childhood,” Sui has said. Filtered through her lens, vintage inspirations from the mainstream (surfers, festival girls, dandies) to the obscure (Lady Diana Cooper) become have-to-have of-the-moment looks for an artsy, adventurous, fashion-loving customer. In 1992, Vogue dubbed Sui “the darling of downtown fashion,” and the accuracy of this description has been reinforced in every one of her front rows. Sofia Coppola, Matt Dillon, Adam Clayton, and Anthony Kiedis were among those in the audience when Sui presented her Spring 1994 show during New York Fashion Week.
“I wanted to work with punk iconography, but re-colored into a more optimistic palette,” says Sui of this spring outing, which was more eclectic than the preceding Fall collection, with its crushed velvets and references to 19th-century dandies. Men in dresses continued the grunge story Sui told for Spring ‘93. Also on the runway were metallics, Peruvian-style knits, and Cleopatra and Dolly Head T-shirts, illustrated, respectively, by Terror and Michael Economy. (The latter was responsible for Deee-Lite’s Groove Is in the Heart album cover art.)
Linda Evangelista opened, wearing a fuzzy panda-bear-head hat by longtime Sui collaborator James Coviello. From there the show—featuring some impromptu moonwalking from models Eve Salvail and Donovan Leitch—crescendoed to an unforgettable finale. Linda, Naomi, and Christy (who had her hair cut into bangs by Garren backstage) brought down the house in flirty, white baby doll dresses accessorized by bow-tied shoes and ankle socks plus wooden cake-shaped bags decorated with plaster by Cupcake Cafe. Completing their looks were marabou-trimmed tiaras in pastel colors. “Innocence looks very fresh to me,” Sui told Vogue at the time. “The world is so hard, we need something that’s a relief from reality.” No one knows better than this designer that girls just want to have fun.
