Anna Sui on why she has always felt like an outsider in the New York fashion scene

Anna Sui embodies so much of what the world worships about America; extravagance and optimism is in everything she touches, and the dreamer inside has been loud and proud at each stage of her 30-year career. Often described as the greatest storyteller in modern fashion, she is currently telling the tale of the United States through a series of collections heavily laced with American symbolism.

Sui’s spring-summer 2017 show at New York Fashion Week was especially patriotic. Titled Americana, it opened with Gigi Hadid in a rose-appliqué cowboy jacket produced by South Paradiso, a Californian company that dressed American icons of the 1960s, including Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Beach Boys. Moments later, models reimagined as cowboys, cheerleaders and even Pennsylvania Dutch emerged to dance around a giant papier-mâché slice of apple pie to the beat of the Mamas and the Papas.

A joyful celebration of her roots, yes. However, in a time when patriotism and nationalism are easily muddled, this optimistic all-American message can appear almost confron­tational, particularly against the backdrop of a liberal, outward-looking fashion industry that’s over­whelmingly opposed to President Donald Trump.

“I’m American. I was born in suburban Detroit and raised on American pop culture,” says Sui, over coffee at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum. “But this is a difficult time to love America and I felt my best response to everything was to celebrate my country and my roots. This is my reaction against the politics of the time. My longing for that dream America – the craziness of cowboys and cheerleaders – all went into my work. Instead of coming out and saying, ‘Not my president,’ this was a way of responding, to celebrate.”

As the daughter of Chinese immigrants from Shanghai and Tahiti, Sui’s reaction to Trump’s isolationist message is understandable. Her parents, who met in Paris as students in the late 40s, moved to Michigan to raise their family in the land of the free. And while Sui speaks eloquently about the complex nature of identity in her newly published book, The World of Anna Sui, it is clear she feels American.

“We were the only Chinese family in town, but I don’t know if I particularly thought at this point about being Chinese, about being so different in that context,” she writes in The World, which was produced in collaboration with fashion journalist Tim Blanks. “I guess because it was just us, we were a novelty, not a threat.”