Anna Sui

Fashion Designer / United States / Anna Sui

www.annasui.com

Anna Sui’s collections take you on a creative journey that is unparalleled in the world of fashion. Mixing vintage styles with her current cultural obsessions, she effortlessly makes hip and exuberant original clothes. Whether her inspiration is Victorian cowboys, Warhol superstars, or Finnish textile prints, her depth of cultural knowledge is always apparent. “When I’m interested in something, I want to know everything about it,” she says, “I need to know what’s behind it all. I really enjoy that process.” Sui’s constant search for new ideas and challenges keeps her ahead of her times. She’s a true trendsetter to whom stylists and editors look for direction. The boundless energy and creative ingenuity of her runway presentations always make her shows a high point of New York Fashion Week.

The career of Anna Sui is a classic American success story. “You have to focus on your dreams, even if they go beyond common sense. How could this young girl from the suburbs of Detroit become a success in New York? It was always that dream,” she says. Today Anna Sui has over 50 boutiques in eight countries and her collection is sold in 300 stores in over 30 countries. Sui still has the same love of fashion that she did when she was a little girl. At age four, she decided that she would become a designer and started to make her own clothes. She mixed a very serious approach to learning her craft with eccentric ideas, such as vowing to not to wear the same outfit twice in one year. “I was completely obsessed,” she says, “I don’t know how my parents put up with me.” Before the end of her senior high school year, she was accepted to Parsons School of Design in New York. After two years at Parsons, Sui styled with friend Steven Meisel and designed for several sportswear companies before launching her first collection in 1981.

Anna Sui’s business continued to grow throughout the 1980s, and in 1991 she premiered her first runway show. The following year she opened her first flagship store on Greene Street in Soho. The boutique’s vibrant mix of black Victorian furniture, purple walls, papier-mâché doll heads, and rock n’ roll posters closely reflects Anna Sui’s personal decorating style and has been the model for all of her shops. The late 1990s was a time of significant growth for Anna Sui; she embarked upon a hugely successful expansion in the Far East, where she quickly established a huge cult following. She also launched cosmetics, fragrance, shoe and accessory licenses. Her devotion to detail is apparent in every one of her products, which are all intimately connected to her world. Her iconic make-up packaging and fragrance bottle design have even become collectors’ items.

Anna Sui was received the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) in 2009 and the same year was honored with a “Classic Icon of Fashion and Design” Award at the China Fashion Awards. The first book of her work, Anna Sui, was published by Chronicle Books in 2010.

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