Anna Sui

It’s not often you find your self so happy and energetic after looking at someone’s collection, but Anna Sui’s runway collections never fail to amaze me. Famous for her amazingly bold style and her retro references, Sui has a lot of different inspirations over her design career: the New York Dolls, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Uzbekistan, the American West, etc. Despite all the noise, Sui manages to get the style right season after season. Sui was born in Detroit to French-educated Chinese emigrants in 1964. She had youthful dreams and was always at the flea markets this opened her eyes to colour and pattern. She landed herself a scholarship and Parsons, after 2 years of studying she threw herself straight into the industry, learning things that she wouldn’t have learnt studying. She was designing sportswear and styling for different photographers. In 1980 she took one of her 6-piece collection to a New York trade fair, and got spotted by a Macy’s buyer, a window and an advert in The New York Times soon followed. For the next 10 years she ran her business out of her apartment, until she was persuaded to step up to the real runway in 1991. After a year she opened her boutique in Soho, and these days she has 30 boutiques worldwide. These photos are taken from her Fall 2011 RTW collection.

Looking at Anna Sui’s designs I can see that she is very inspired by the hippie style, it’s different and inspirational. Her designs look more like what the hippie would wear and are also cut to the style of a hippie outfit, but there is something new and different about her designs. I think it’s the way she used the print and colour in her design, she keeps the colour all together yet at the same time mixes it up a bit, but adding some colours that wouldn’t normally look right together but they do. She also put her designs with accessories that make her garments into a finish outfit, using hats and big chunky necklaces this brings the outfit together and makes her spectacularly different. Something that I see in her designs is her upbringing, she was brought up to be free, she would make clothes for her friends and people she was closest too, but never really made herself known to the industry until she was made too. I think she this love for making clothes as more of a hobby than a career shows in her designs as she has fun with it. 

What I feel about Anna Sui is that her designs will never fail to make me smile or bring a bit of brightness to my life, she has it in her blood the way she is brings happiness and love to her designs and I don’t think anyone can change this, so hopefully there will be plenty more collections full of the same colour and boldness, that when people watch them at fashion week they’ll come out more happy than they did going in.