16 September 2025 |
Talking vintage style with the designer in honor of her new book.
Anna Sui will always proudly be a fashion wild child of the ‘90s, ever since she presented her first fantasy fueled runway show in 1991. The New York icon originally came from Michigan and moved to the city to study at Parsons, shaking things up in the underground scene. Sui would dress up in skinny scarves, babydoll dresses and chunky beaded necklaces to attend the infamously cool clubs Max’s Kansas City, CBGB or Mudd Club before she launched her own brand. It’s an era that is now forever defined in her new book, The Nineties X Anna Sui. “I just wanted to show how authentic it was back then,” she tells us. A copy of the tome was waiting for each guest, as they entered the iconic Hotel Chelsea to attend her spring 2026 show this weekend. The glittering front row was a love letter to Sui’s eccentric, fabulous circle featuring Zandra Rhodes, Marc Jacobs, Vera Wang and Sofia Coppola.
Attending an Anna Sui show feels like taking a trip to a new whimsical, faraway wonderland. For spring 2026, she brought to life the eccentric, specific bohemian excess of DH Lawrence, the English author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who in 1919, ended up in Taos, New Mexico, at the Mabel Dodge Luhan ranch. “People like Georgia O’Keefe and Millicent Rogers came to stay with D.H. Lawrence and his new wife Frieda von Richthofen; she was mixing the Bohemian look with the Southwest,” Sui says. “I just loved the way she would put herself together with peasant shirts. She’d wrap a sarong around her hips, wear indigenous jewelry mixed with her bohemian beads, and top scarves on her head with a cowboy hat.” Dennis Hopper discovered Mabel Lodge Luhan ranch while shooting his Easy Rider in the 1960s and later bought it, renaming it the “Mud Palace” which also inspired Sui.
Sui is one of the handful of New York designers from the era who still regularly show at New York Fashion Week today, and of course, the genius of her collections is that even among all the era spanning references, you can always find a little bit of that ‘90s style. Titled Desert Blooms, rich saffrons, lilacs and periwinkles came sun-faded in the form of decadent lace, denim, fringe, sheer skirts, big belts, and new renditions of the infamous babydoll dress Sui is so well-known for. Models wore electric blue eyeshadow with heart-shaped Gibson Girl inspired mini bouffants by Garren. The babydoll, in fact, has its own chapter in the new book. “That was probably the biggest part of my business all through the ‘90s especially,” she says. “I think that everybody really liked what I did because it had always had a vintage touch to it. Sometimes it looked like it came from the flea market, or like the print was antique. But there was always an edge to it be it rock and roll or punk. I would always mix all those elements together to make it not like everybody else.”
Images from the book “The Nineties X Anna Sui”
Flipping through the pages of the new volume, it’s easy to see how personal the project was to Sui. The unconventional layout feels like a scrapbook, and is full of behind the scenes runway photos taken by her dad and brother. “I wouldn’t see the show until I saw my dad’s photographs, or I saw photographs in the press the next day,” says Sui of her early collections. Look closely and you just might spot the dressing cards or music track list hand-written by Sui. “I worked with Frédéric Sanchez, and it would be so much fun because he knew so much about music that I would get an education every single time, depending on whatever the theme was. We’d spend hours together. Every soundtrack meant so much because those were the songs that I was loving at the moment, they were the ones I was playing when I was sketching, or they were the theme behind the show.”
Music was–and still is–undoubtedly one of the biggest influences for Sui. Some may remember when Dave Navarro of the Red Hot Chili Peppers took a turn on her spring 1997 runway, wearing a purple lace lingerie top and black leather pants. “We had such a great music scene, especially in the ‘90s, all the alternative bands that were coming through New York,” she says. “I went to see a lot of concerts, and then a lot of those people were in my shows or coming to my shows. It got to the point where before the show, the PR people would say, ‘Anna, stop going out. We’ve got too many people. You can’t add any more people!’”
In the landscape of New York fashion, Sui will forever be an icon. “New York was very decadent,” adds Sui, of how the city inspired her work. “There were so many incredible clubs. You could go out every night of the week and stay out all night. Everybody would be there. Suddenly Warhol would walk in, or Mick Jagger or Cher. You just didn’t know who you were going to see.”
As the book demonstrates, many of important collections were also inspired by her own personal style. “Every collection was always what I wanted, but then there was also the fantasy of what I wish I could wear,” she says. But that’s not to say she didn’t also consider the woman she was dressing. “Sometimes there would be a model that I would keep in mind and do something particular like Naomi Campbell. She wore clothes differently and she always loved purple, so I would make a special dress [in that color] for her.”
But the biggest takeaway from her book and collection is a return to fashion as expression and creativity. “[The book is intended to show] the genuine realness of that period of time. It was organic,” she says. “Everything nowadays has turned into such a big business that it has lost that genuineness. It’s all about commerce, where back then it wasn’t.” At a time when New York Fashion Week is undoubtedly more commercial than ever before, Sui’s collections remind us that the city still has its legends that continue to write the next chapters of alluring fashion history.
