Anna Sui was just four years old when she decided she wanted to be a fashion designer.
She had travelled from her hometown of Detroit to New York to be a flower girl at her aunt and uncle’s wedding.
Sui was entranced by all the beautiful clothes — and from that moment, she knew she would someday return to the design mecca.
“My new goal was, ‘How do I get to New York and become a fashion designer?'” she recalled in a q interview with Tom Power.
“There’s a photograph of me in the wedding party, but I’m looking off into my fantasy, and everyone else is caught up in the wedding. I think that might have been the aha moment.”
Madonna’s ‘surprise’
Decades later, an encounter with Madonna changed everything for Sui, whose eclectic and reference-infused work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, which runs until Feb. 23.
By the late ’80s and early ’90s, Sui was working as a stylist and designer, but hadn’t yet had her own runway show.
She had never been to Paris Fashion Week either, but in 1991, she went with her friend Steven Meisel, the legendary fashion photographer whose work appeared in Madonna’s groundbreaking book, Sex.
On the way to the first show, the pair went to pick up Madonna at the Ritz, and once inside her hotel room, Sui was amazed by the racks and bags of clothing by every major designer in Paris.
“I was so jealous and thinking, Oh my God, here is somebody who can have anything she wants.”
But the biggest surprise was yet to come. The group rushed out of the room and into a limo, got to the Jean Paul Gaultier show, and as Madonna took off her coat, she said, “Anna, I have a surprise for you.”
“She was wearing my dress,” Sui said. “That was one of those moments where I thought, ‘Maybe I do have a chance. Maybe I can do something.'”Sui’s 1st show”
When they arrived back in New York, Meisel said it was time for Sui to do her own show.
“Of course, it seemed to be an impossible prospect at that point. This was at the height of Versace and Chanel, these big mega-brands. But somehow [the Madonna encounter] was one of those things that boosted me — like yes, maybe I could do it.”
That first show included supermodels Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, to name a few, and cemented Sui’s spot with the top designers of the day. Now, her $400 million empire includes multiple fashion lines, shoes, cosmetics, fragrances, jewellery, home goods and more.
Read full article at CBC
