Anna Sui is an American fashion designer and perfumer, who is much celebrated in the history of fashion. She is known for her enduring designs and her skill for developing collections with cultural and historical references.
Background
Ethnicity:
Anna Sui is a descendent of the Fang family of Tongcheng, Anhui, a Quin and Ming dynasty noble family.
Mrs. Sui was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States, on August 4, 1952. She is the middle child of French-educated Chinese emigrants, Paul Sui and Grace Sui Fang who met while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris where her father was studying engineering and her mother, painting.
Her paternal grandparents were Xiao Yu Lan, a Tahitian-Chinese businessman, and his wife Qiu Daitai. Mrs. Sui's maternal grandparents were Fang Chih, a Chinese diplomat and his wife Fang Ih-chi (born Masue Ueki), a Japanese woman. Anna Sui is an 18th generation descendant of Fang Bao, an influential Chinese poet who founded the Tongcheng School of literary prose popular throughout the Qing Empire. Notable ancestors also include Fang Gongcheng, tutor of the imperial palace, and Fang Guancheng, Viceroy of Zhili seated at Tianjin from 1749 to 1768 amongst other Qing era scholars.
Education
By the time she was four years old, Anna Sui knew she wanted to be a fashion designer. Her mother taught her about putting together a wardrobe, bringing a young Mrs. Sui with her to shop for fabrics. She would spend hours watching her mother sew and would collect the fabric scraps to clothe her Barbie dolls and her brothers' army action figures. Through this process, Mrs. Sui learned the basics of making clothing and soon she was putting together her own outfits.
As a teenager, she read a piece of writing in Life Magazine that described the life of a woman who was a graduate from Parsons The New School for Design and then shifted to Paris where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor opened a boutique for her. At the time, Mrs. Sui had found her ticket to fashion and she dreamt about moving to the same institute. So, some years later Mrs. Sui moved to New York and attended Parsons.
Career
After her graduation, Mrs. Sui gained hands-on experience in the field by making designs for sportswear brands and by styling models on photo shoots of Steven Meisel. Around the same time, she started designing and producing apparel on her own from her apartment. Whilst working at Glenora, Anna Sui presented her five piece collection at a trade show in New York and managed to attract some department stores of the city. After a few weeks, her clothes were shown through an advertisement in New York Times. Seeing this, Glenora‘s manager was upset and fired her instantly.
Left unemployed, Anna Sui invested her saving of $300 on a business she operated from the living room of her flat. In 1983 she managed to form her own company. For several years, her company remained this way and for extra income she did odd-jobs. All her earning were re-invested into the business. The 80s were a golden period for companies like Versace, Lacoix and Chanel. With such a fashion landscape, it was difficult (but not impossible) for Sui to stand up to the position of such big names.
Mrs. Sui was one of the few designers of the period who distanced herself from the traditional fashion houses and explored the grunge fashion scene together with designers such as Marc Jacobs, Daryl K and Todd Oldham. Rock music has been Anna Sui’s initial stimulation towards fashion designing. She was involved at the time’s punk scene and was highly attracted to rock stars’ dressing style. For her, they were the most interesting individuals. Later on, she approached other kinds of designs and cuts for her clothes rather than using only music as her foundation. Around 1987, she got the opportunity to move her line into Annette B, a showroom curated by Annette Breindel. Mrs. Breindel, who had a history of nurturing young designers, was a major influence for Anna Sui and helped the designer emerge onto the fashion scene.
Mrs. Sui’s career breakthrough happened when supermodels, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell as well as Meisel and Madonna, who have been her long-time friends, convinced Mrs. Sui to conduct a catwalk show. Hence, the designer rented a petite place and hired models to conduct the retrospective in 1991. Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista were the star performers and Anna Sui’s collection was praised by the audience.
The designer opened her first retail location in 1992 at 113 Greene Street in New York City's Soho District. The flagship store was known for its red floors, antique black furniture, signature dolly head mannequins and its purple walls which Mrs. Sui painted herself. In 1993, the Anna Sui Corporation opened a store in Hollywood at La Brea Avenue expanding coverage and controlling North American distribution. The same year, Anna Sui introduced menswear into her runway collections with Mick Jagger later appearing on Saturday Night Live in one of the designer's suits.
Anna Sui Shoes, manufactured in Venice, Italy, premiered on the runway for the fall collection in 1994. Later, Mrs. Sui began production of a diffusion fashion line called "Sui by Anna Sui" and a jeans line called "Anna Sui Jeans" with Italian fashion house, Gilmar S.p.A. Starting in 1995, Anna Sui's designs were showcased regularly in Vogue Patterns.
The first freestanding Anna Sui boutiques opened in 1997 in Tokyo and Osaka through a distribution and sales license with Isetan. Mrs. Sui also partnered with Italian shoemaker Ballin to create a shoe line. She designed her iconic mannequins together with New York gallerist Ralph Pucci. The mannequins were based on the measurements of actress Michele Hicks and would later form the inspiration for her first diffusion brand, Dolly Girl.
In 1999, Mrs. Sui launched her fragrance, Anna Sui Classic, with Wella AG and cosmetics line with Albion. In 2000, she launched a skincare line, also with Albion.The same year, her collections were featured as a part of the Fashion in Motion exhibition at London's Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2003, the designer launched her Dolly Girl fragrance together with several limited edition sets in the Dolly Girl series. At the same time she launched a long term collaboration collection with Peruvian designer Ali Rapp called Ali Rapp for Anna Sui. The following year the designer entered a collaboration with Dark Horse Comics and William Tucci designing the wardrobe for several of the main characters in Tucci's Shi: Ju-Nen, a miniseries in the hit comic Shi. Mrs. Sui took the wardrobes from her Fall 2004 fashion collection, with items including yukata kimono minidresses and purple hose and high-heels.
In 2005, Anna Sui was contracted by Samsung Electronics Co. in partnership with Vogue to design a Samsung SGH-E315 cell phone. The limited edition handset which was available through T-Mobile sold out in the first month with products occasionally coming for sale on eBay. In 2006, she launched a limited edition Anna Sui Boho Barbie doll in partnership with Mattel. She later launched a limited edition collection with Victoria's Secret called Anna Sui for Victoria's Secret.
In 2008, Mrs. Sui launched the Dolly Girl clothing collection in Japan to follow up on her previous fragrance lines. Later in 2008, she partnered with Nissan to design a customized car, the Nissan 350z Anna Sui Limited Edition which was featured at various roadshows.
She has also collaborated with: Target Corporation (2009), Andrew Bolton (2010), Hush Puppies (2011), Coach IP Holdings LLC (2012) etc. From May to November 2013, clothing from Anna Sui's 1999 and 2000 collections were featured at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology as a part of their RetroSpective: Fashion & Textile History Gallery exhibition. In November Mrs. Sui and Albion partnered with Asos to launch a Fall/Winter 2013 Anna Sui Cosmetics line in Europe. The series featured a collaboration with Disney. On February 2, 2014, Lee Min-ho announced the Anna Sui for Fila collection on behalf of Anta Sports Products and Fila China which launched in 2015. In April, Mrs. Sui returned to her native Detroit to partner with the Ford Motor Company in creating the Mustang Unleashed Collection celebrating the 50 year anniversary of the Ford Mustang.
In March 2015, she partnered with Sailor Moon to launch the Sailor Moon × Anna Sui collection which was featured at the Isetan store in Shinjuku. Mrs. Sui also partnered with French dessert maker Ladurée, Starbucks ande Kenner/Takara. Besides from her work as a fashion designer, Anna Sui regularly gives lectures to students and around the United States to inspire future generations to pursue their dreams. Mrs. Sui has also taken part in several TV shows as well as documentaries.
Views
Quotations:
"Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction. That's human nature."
"Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing."
"I think that fashion has become such a big business and with globalization we are on new territory at this point. We are not just designing for a country we are designing for a world now."
"To me if you're going have a show, it should be a show. It should be entertaining and take you on a journey."
"I think whenever people talk about the 'Anna Sui woman,' they're talking about someone that's probably kind of more downtown, and there's always like this ambiguity: Is she a good girl, or a bad girl?"
"When I look at designer books I am sometimes puzzled why they don't share their inspiration, when it's obvious somebody had such great inspiration."
"Fashion should be fun and accessible."
"Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection."
"I love research. When there's something that I like, I want to know everything about it. I want to know exactly what was behind it, and where it went from there."
"I don't have the luxury of making clothes just to make an effect. It can't be something totally frivolous, because my distributors have to have a successful season, too."