How Anna Sui saw the future of fashion before everyone else, and how the designer stays ahead of the pack
- Gucci’s magpie style? Anna Sui’s done it for decades. Gender fluid clothing? She designed it first. Grunge. Where rivals are just arriving she has already been
- The fashion world used to ask ‘Where is she coming from?’ Now it’s saluting the breadth of Sui’s ideas in an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design
If you are delighted by the magpie style that has come to define Gucci and that has seeped into your wardrobe by way of Zara or H&M, then you must thank designer Anna Sui, because she has been creating collections that mix Victorian lace with hippie flowers and punk denim since she founded her line in 1981.
If you are someone who identifies as male but prefers sweet dresses to sedate trousers, then you should give Sui a round of applause, because she was blurring gender in her catwalk shows before doing so was a political statement.
If you love grunge and got all worked up when Marc Jacobs reissued pieces from his 1993 grunge collection for Perry Ellis, it’s worth remembering that Sui’s 1993 grunge collection was pretty darn good. And, unlike Jacobs, she didn’t get fired for it, because she was running her own company.
In other words, Sui is one of those unnervingly prescient people who always seems to have been where everyone else is just arriving.
Her influence isn’t simply everywhere; her aesthetic has become part of the fashion vocabulary from which almost everyone draws. She has changed the way you dress. And instead of bemoaning how others are now receiving kudos and cash for an aesthetic she pioneered, she is as gracious as can be.
“So many years, it was, ‘Where is she coming from?’ Sui says. “I was lucky to be where I was in the beginning when it was kind of different and revolutionary. Now it’s about keeping my relevance.”
