Anna Sui Talks ’90s Fashion, Vintage Shopping, and Viral TikTok Trends
The world of Anna Sui is bigger than you think.
She makes umbrellas and pet clothes in Japan. She sells her vintage dresses at Free People. She has partnered with Starbucks and McDonald’s and Disney and Target. (You can find all the relics on eBay, where once-cheap items like branded coffee cups now go for $70.) In April, Sanrio released a cartoon in Sui’s likeness. And just last month, the Michigan native quietly released a laptop for the Taipei tech brand Asus. It’s purple and comes with butterfly stickers.
Most designers who achieve this kind of world domination are pretty loud about it. Sui knows better. Her clothes can—and do—speak for themselves. For spring 2025, that includes a kooky mix of electric blue gingham dresses, auto mechanic-style jackets redone in pink wallpaper florals, and some choice frothy crinoline—but made in jet black, not prom-dress pink. “I wanted to make a lighter collection,” Sui says from her modest office in midtown Manhattan. She called the vibe “perky and jeune-fille,” a French phrase that describes, essentially, a damsel. “I looked at a lot of photos of Brigette Bardot in her early ’60s days in St. Tropez,” she explains.
If the baby-pink swimsuit tops and lace-edged crinoline skirts sound like a Sabrina Carpenter video come to life, that’s partly the point. After all, Sui has an almost mystic ability to foresee future trends just before anyone else. She began working on this collection over six months ago—well before “Espresso” went from a coffee order to a cultural touchstone—and instructed her design team to hone in on a “demure” vibe before the word transcended all meaning on the internet. How is she doing it? “You just tune out what other people say you should do,” she says, waving her hands as if conducting an orchestra. “You know, I was always kind of a rebel to other people. I just did my own thing.”
Sui knows her thing has become, well, everybody’s thing. A beloved Gen X and millennial brand for years, her namesake label became a Gen Z obsession right around 2017, when the designer cannily cast Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid on her catwalk. Doll-faced rock vixens like Olivia Rodrigo, Suki Waterhouse, and Karen Elson carried Sui’s style torch. Then social media helped make her a de facto wardrobe whisperer for young women with both money and an extreme enthusiasm for embroidered silk. The surge in Gen Z interest resulted in a serious demand for the designer’s vintage collections—a neat thing, considering Sui herself is a vintage junkie.
“It’s such a different thing now, vintage,” she says. “You used to have to go out and search for what you wanted. You used to need to be lucky. Now, you have a search engine. You type in ‘Chanel bow’ and there it is. ‘Miu Miu shoes,’ there they are. Then it’s just a matter of, are you going to pay for this vintage thing? Because prices have gone through the ceiling. Then, vintage wasn’t exactly an investment, you know? It was a quest. You had to be lucky.”
I ask Sui if she considers herself lucky. “Of course, but also, very disciplined,” she says nonchalantly. “I’m the first one into the office and the last one out. I don’t think there’s a substitute for an incredibly strong work ethic. You’ve got to do it for yourself.” Cast in point: Next month, Sui will release five fragrances in the U.S. market. “The hint is ‘Sally, go ‘round the roses,’ which is the theme name of the spring 2025 collection, and also a Jaynetts song!” she says.
So, a bunch of floral perfumes, paired with the daisy-embroidered lace dresses and kilts from Sui’s spring 2025 line, based on a ’60s doo-wop band fronted by three teenage girls in New York? The TikTok algorithm is already being written.
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