Beginning by starting her own fashion label with three hundred dollars and her apartment living room, Anna Sui is the embodiment of the American dream. With her hard work and dedication to her art, she built her brand from the ground up into what is now one of the most successful American made fashion labels, revered for her unique designs and sixth sense for the cultural zeitgeist.
While she was in town for SCADstyle last week, I got the opportunity to sit down with her at the Perry Lane Hotel for a conversation before her panel.
Caroline Tetlow: How are you liking SCAD so far? I heard you got a tour of the fibers and fashion buildings.
Anna Sui: It’s been so much fun being here. It’s so eye opening and I think the school is incredible. Yeah, I mean I would like to come back to go to school here.
Tetlow: It’s a great school! We have awesome resources. I’d like to start by asking about your design process. What’s the first thing you start with when you sit down to create a collection? Do you start with a pen and sketchbook? Do you like fabrics? Do you start with draping?
Sui: You know, it all stems from the fabric. Of course I’ll have a concept or an idea in mind but I look at dozens of fabric collections every season and start choosing things that I like without even having a theme or a direction. Because sometimes there’s a new technology that you just want to get into, or there’s a color that you see that just sparks an idea. You just never know what you’re going to discover but you try to trust your instincts, and make these fabric selections. So by the end of that process, I have this whole table that’s just piled with swatches. Then I keep going through the swatches and thinking like what was it initially that attracted me, or I want something really shiny so I go through all the things that are shiny, or I want something that’s sequined or something that’s printed, so you know it’s a process of elimination. You put it up, you fall in love with it, and then maybe a couple days later, you don’t think it looks as good. It’s just that process that I keep going through over and over again, up until the last minute.
Tetlow: There’s so many new innovative textiles and swatches that are just so interesting. I feel like recently we started to accept sustainability as kind of the baseline for design instead of a buzzword, or like a separate entity. Are there any new interesting sustainability initiatives on the horizon for you, or is there anything you’re focusing on now as far as sourcing or development?
Sui: I think I’ve always been conscious of sustainability because I own my own business. I never had a huge amount of investment. I had to save steps all along, and I’ve always done my production in New York. I didn’t understand people making tech packs and sending them to China and a sample comes back and then you have to make the corrections and send it back. It just seemed like futility when you could have a pattern maker do a draping right in front of your eyes. I like that immediacy and I’ve always wanted to be really supportive of making the clothes in the garment district. The other thing is when I first started, this whole idea of deadstock wasn’t called deadstock. I didn’t have a choice. I would go down to the lower east side and scour the basements and in the upstairs rooms and find rolls of fabric and that’s how we did my first collection. We always made with deadstock fabric but there was no name for it then. It was just 30 yards or 20 yards and that’s how I presented my collection. Luckily, my business grew enough that I could make the minimum and I spent a lot of time meeting the owners of the companies and going up to the showrooms myself. Usually by the end of the conversation, they were willing to help me or give me credit to buy the fabric. It was all about establishing those relationships.
Tetlow: Going back to your history, with the new 20 year trend cycle a lot of 90s and y2k silhouettes are popular again. I saw in an interview you talked about reusing some of those patterns from that era in your current collections. What has it been like for you to look back at those past designs and turn them into something for the 2020s?
Sui: We did collection after collection since 1991 and I never even looked at those samples again, they just went in a box into storage. In 2015 I did an exhibition with the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. We had this 120 piece exhibition and it traveled to Japan and Shanghai. Recently it was in North Carolina, Florida, and in New York, and it was so eye opening. But also when the collection or when the exhibition was in New York they said “Well can you reproduce 10 outfits?” And I thought okay, this is a challenge because again, I said everything was made in America and now nothing is, and we had to find similar fabrics and get similar processes. We made a capsule collection for them at the same time Marc Jacobs was relaunching his grunge collection. He said, “Why don’t you make some of your grunge collection too.” That was the first time that we pulled things from our own pasts and we had such a great response. The fashion buyers loved my 90s collections, so they’ve been coming to me every season. Can you do a capsule of this? Can you do a capsule of that? It’s been a challenge because a lot of those fabrics don’t exist anymore. We have to find new technology to make them but it’s been a lot of fun, and I think that’s what’s really resonating with a lot of the younger customers.
Tetlow: I really admire the way that you use fashion to tell stories and there’s that narrative aspect of it that runs through all of your collections. Tell me a little bit about why you’re drawn to storytelling, and how that translates into your shows.
Sui: Before every collection, you’re in a panic. It’s like you want to get struck by lightning to come up with an idea. And once that idea gets sparked, you just kind of run with it and I love learning more about what it is I’m obsessed about. I have this inspiration board that I build the collection on, and I do a lot of research. It kind of gives the story to my staff and then I have a lot of licenses that we have to present the new collection to, so it explains the whole story. Some of the pictures might not mean anything to anybody else, but it helps me stay focused on what it is that I’m trying to get across. For example, there’s one collection we’re going to show in the talk tonight, where I was working on a collection inspired by Marie Antoinette and Sofia Coppola invited me to Paris when she was filming. So the collection was all inspired by Marie Antoinette fabrics and things. But right before I went to Paris, I went to the naval museum in Turkey and there was a whole exhibition on Barbarossa the pirate and I thought “Pirates. Oh, that’s so romantic”. Then I realized that there was a similar timeline, so I pulled in this whole pirate fantasy, but then it reminded me of the dress code during the days of the New York Dolls and glam rock where everybody wore black and white stripes and rose prints and polka dots. So I put those all together. Again, I don’t think anybody could follow the train of thought but that’s how I put together the collection, and that’s been one of my favorite collections I ever did.
Tetlow: Speaking of putting together collections, do you have any advice for someone starting a collection? A lot of us, including myself, are about to start their senior collections and I know it’s a really daunting thought. Do you have any advice on where to start or any helpful tips?
Sui: You’ll find that your early collections are the easiest to do because you don’t have as big of a financial challenge or any limitation as far as expectation. You can do whatever you want, you know, without being pigeon holed. Now is your time to really express yourself and let it all show. I think that the other important thing is establishing your identity, because I think part of the longevity of my brand is the fact that I had such an identifiable look. It’s very feminine, but trendy. It’s very ladylike but with rock and roll thrown in. There’s just those things that people can relate to and then you establish iconic symbols like the black and the purple, the black lacquer, and the carved roses and that became my branding for all my cosmetics. So all of it is just so identifiably Anna Sui. I think that’s the thing you need to stick to. It’s now your time to shine and come up with those concepts.
Special thanks to Anna Sui for speaking with me!
Interview conducted by Caroline Tetlow.
Graphic by Reem Hinedi.