Anna Sui Is Ready to Tell You About the ’90s
Anna Sui, with her rock-and-roll-meets-romance sensibilities and creative circle of friends, helped shape the look of the ’90s. With her first runway show in 1991, Sui’s frilly garments, ornate accessories, and overall aesthetic made her catwalks hot tickets and her babydoll dresses off-duty must-haves. Her collections now serve as both quintessential time capsules for the era and modern-day wells of inspiration, surging again in popularity among zoomers.
In her new book, aptly titled The Nineties, the designer, alongside firsthand accounts from her famous friends like Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, recounts the formative decade. The book has it all: Parties. Catwalks. Musicians. Movie stars. And Sui answers the question every person who wasn’t old enough to live the ’90s really wants to know: Was it really as fun as it looked?
What made you want to explore the ’90s specifically through a book?
There’s been so much curiosity about it and so many requests for the clothes. When I go to dinners or any events, so many people ask me, “What was it like? It seems like it was so awesome.” When I start talking about how intimate it was — how it was much a much smaller circle of friends, and there was so much more camaraderie and communication, because we didn’t have the internet, and so it was all word of mouth. You would go to an event and you hear about another event. You would meet people at a concert or a party and invite them to the show. It was up close and personal.
Was that ’90s circle of friends you ran in with Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs as fun as it looks?
One thing always led to another, like a model would be dating the movie star, the rock star, and then ask, “Can he come backstage? Can he come to the show?” It was just so exciting. I would go to a concert and go backstage and meet everybody in the band and tell them to come to my show. It was much easier to access. Everything wasn’t like, “My publicist is going to do this and my PR person is going to do this.” It was face-to-face.
If you could revisit one memory or moment from the ’90s, which one would you choose to go back to?
My first show. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I just remember André Leon Talley being backstage, and him commentating, and then it was over. A show is like ten minutes, but you spend six months preparing for it, and you’re so involved in every little detail and what goes with what, and who’s wearing what, and then it just zooms by. I remember thinking, It can’t be over.
What did André say during the show?
He would just be like, “Oh, darling, that’s fabulous.” There was no one like him. The first time I saw him was outside of a club, and he was commenting on who was coming in and what they were wearing. I remember I had these silver platform shoes and he goes, “Oh, silver platform shoes! Look at that!” It was always hysterical.
Where were you pulling inspiration from for your collections during that time?
So much of what I was creating before that, and in my mind, was always nostalgia — a fantasy about something from a bygone era. It was such an interesting time because all the arts converged — the music business, the movie business, the art world, and fashion. There was a seismic change, like suddenly everything was different. There were all these new designers. There was a whole different outlook on fashion. It wasn’t so head-to-toe Miss Biz anymore, it was more about what you loved. It was so genuine and not manufactured.
And you felt like that was like coming through in the work that you were doing then?
I think so. I felt, “Oh, this is my time. This is gonna happen now.” And I was very inspired by all the bands that I was seeing and also incorporating a lot of my vintage feeling into it.
You said your collections are often rooted in nostalgia. I’m wondering now, since the ’90s were 30 years ago, are you ever pulling nostalgia from then for your current work?
Definitely. It started out more as a request from different retailers, and then, when Opening Ceremony asked me if I would recreate ten outfits from the ’90s when I had my museum exhibition in New York, and then Marc Jacobs asked me if I would recreate my grunge collection when he was recreating his grunge collection, because it never got distributed. And then my nieces at Christmastime and Thanksgiving would show up wearing their mom’s things and were like, “You should make this again Aunty Anna.” It was exciting to see that people were still embracing it all. That renewed my interest because I, frankly, never looked at it again. It just went in a box and in the closet.
Speaking of putting things into boxes, what was the process of sourcing all of the imagery for this book like?
I’m a pack rat, so I don’t know any different than to put things in the box. I realized I had all those Polaroids because every show, that’s how we do the lineup. I had put a rubber band around them and put in the box with the notes on the music and what the outfit descriptions were. The photos were really sentimental, because back then, the monitor backstage rarely worked if there was one, so I never really saw the show. My father and my brother were always in the audience taking photos. My father and my ritual after my show was usually at seven at night, we would go to dinner. The next morning, we’d take the film into a developing place, and then go pick it up a couple hours later, and that would be the first time I would see the show.
I always looked at how the models looked, but also who was in the audience and where they were and what the reactions were. It gave me so much information. My dad was just so cute. You can see him sometimes in the videos, just popping up and taking a picture each time. So very sentimental.
Your friends, like Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs, also always show up. Did you know back then, when you guys were kind of coming up together, that you guys were all going to “make it”?
No, I think it was more birds of a feather. With Sofia and Zoe Cassavetes, they came to my show because their friend Donovan was walking in the show, and then I went out to L.A., and they wanted to have dinner. So Marc was out in L.A. with me, and we all went to dinner, and I remember saying, “Can you take us to a trendy place instead?” because the restaurants were kind of fancy, and we’d be dressed for dinner, and they’d come in casual clothes. Don’t you ever dress up for dinner? In New York, we always get dressed for dinner and it’s a happening. They started coming to New York more, and I started spending more time in L.A. because they convinced me to open a store out there.
What makes a long-lasting friendship like that span over decades?
One of the really important things is, as we all got busier and busier, we all still really made an effort to get together. It’s not that easy. Everybody’s got such a crazy schedule and traveling all the time, and so we kind of just always stay in touch and ask, “When are we gonna have dinner? Let’s make a plan. You around this month?” We still do our big dinners, and we dress up. We call them glamorous dinners, so that we can all wear our finery.
What’s a glamorous restaurant that you guys go to?
We used to love La Grenouille because I remember seeing all the beautiful people going there — like Jackie O., Babe Paley. Now it’s Mr. Chow. It’s a nostalgia trip for all of us.
On the point of nostalgia, what do you make of Gen Z being so fixated on the ’90s?
It was real. It wasn’t manufactured. It wasn’t paid for. Right now, everything is about business. The front row is about business. Who wears what is about business. And it wasn’t back then. I remember Linda Evangelista wearing my baby-doll dress to Paris for the fittings for couture, and getting phone calls from all the other models asking me to send them the dress Linda was wearing. It wasn’t like they were going to get paid to wear that dress. They just wanted it. It was much more genuine, and I think that people are picking up on that.
When I talk about going out at night, there were a handful of restaurants, and if you went to one of them, or you heard there was something going on, guaranteed you would see ten to 20 people that you wanted to see, plus see whoever that new movie star was or a rock star. It’s like everybody kind of hung in the same place. Now, you go out and like, it’s like, Who are these people? Why am I here? It was so much fun. I feel that now it’s too much about business and publicists and where you should be seen and what you should wear. I liked it better when it was a personal choice.