Anna Sui Rewinds to the ’90s With a Book Full of Fashion Legends

It’s all fun and fashion games until your dress is too short for the Pope. Linda Evangelista learned this the hard way in 1994, when she arrived at God’s palazzo in a babydoll dress by her friend Anna Sui. The wispy straps and bum-grazing hem proved too much for the priests on duty, and the supermodel was forced to vacate the Vatican on her summer vacation. “We laughed about it later,” Sui tells W from her studio in Manhattan’s Garment District. “These Italian guys in uniforms were yelling to Linda about her shoulders and her knees. It was like being back at school.” Ever the quick-thinking stylist, Sui covered Evangelista’s cleavage in a black woolen shawl and found her some leggings. But first, they took a photo.

That tidbit is just one colorful moment of many in The Nineties x Anna Sui, which hits stores on September 16. A catalog of trends like punk, glam rock, and grunge, the book is also a kind of yearbook for the models, celebrities, and cultural misfits that Sui snagged in her hand-embroidered nets during her first decade at New York Fashion Week. In the book’s 176 pages, Sui traces her creative process visually with sketches, fabric swatches, show photos, and film stills mixed with commentary from friends and collaborators like Sofia Coppola, who writes, “Anna understood how girls wanted to dress, and she was in touch with that.” Turn the page, and you’ll see Coppola wearing fuzzy devil horns and Sui’s lacy burgundy corset dress in a Japanese teen magazine.

Much like her leopard-print miniskirt, Sui says the book happened “because people kept asking me to make it.” Sui’s legendary run in the ’90s, she says, had taken over every conversation in her life—during model fittings, at family dinners with her Gen Z nieces, when she ventured out to vintage fairs. The obsession with the era reached new heights last year, a fascination that Sui attributes to the fact that “what comes across, what you can’t fake, is how intimate and genuine it was.” She recalls with a sigh that when she began her career fresh out of Parsons School of Design in New York City, there was no finance department warning American talent about mandatory inventory and sell-through rates. “You made the clothes you saw in your head, but couldn’t find anywhere else,” she says. “You knew what it should be. Nobody else could tell you.”

The yearn for creative freedom (and, even better, financial silence) is something Sui references often, both in the book and in our conversation. As Sui tells it, some of her most influential designs happened via happenstance—her new neighbor was editing a Bob Dylan documentary, and she realized Joan Baez was a ready muse; she fell in love with a sari in the window of Bergdorf Goodman that “turned out to be the Duchess of Windsor’s dress” and birthed her now-famous slip dress. (“When we showed them on the runway, it was slightly before Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy was wearing them,” Sui explains. “Then Calvin Klein did his.”) The Nineties: Anna Sui presents grunge-era New York as akin to Laurel Canyon in the 1960s or Ancient Rome in 60 B.C.—a kind of vortex where the city vibrated with great artists, new ideas, and a remarkable concentration of windswept girls with amazing hair and unfairly long torsos.

For fashion fans, this nostalgic sweet spot comes in handy throughout the book, as readers are struck repeatedly by the “wow, cool” realization that Anna Sui did many style staples first. Hit up page 24 to see Sui’s double-take of girls and boys in twinning smock frocks, a whole two decades before Alessandro Michele channeled the concept for Gucci. Page 31’s got a mix of Scandi needlepoint sweaters and see-through nightgowns that birthed both some Miu Miu looks and a hundred high school costumes for Spring Awakening. Jean Paul Gaultier’s candy-colored plaid suits were first built by Sui on Naomi Campbell, circa 1992.

Sui herself is generous about the ways that even in today’s constipated economy, you can channel her visions of punk fairies and bookish hippies without spending much, if any, cash. “On the runway, I was showing how to create the look,” she writes. “But you can easily adapt.” You can also find a fair amount of Sui’s designs on resale sites like Vestiaire and The RealReal. (On peer-to-peer resale sites like Poshmark, take care to find Sui’s runway collection archive and not her 2009 Target dupes, which are adorable but not exactly a vintage score.) “I love that you can find my old designs online,” Sui says. “It’s incredible to know people want to wear the same things now that they did when I first made them. I find it a real honor.”

Vintage Sui shoppers may even come across pieces first worn by Sui’s many famous fans, who are carefully spotlit throughout The Nineties x Anna Sui. Those scanning for stars will note Winona Ryder, Lenny Kravitz, Claire Danes, Dave Navarro, and Courtney Love radiating their untouchable auras while slouching in Sui’s clothes. Marc Jacobs even confesses his jealousy of Sui’s front rows in the 1990s, comparing them to “rock concerts.” Sui deflects that comparison. “It was actually really chill,” she explains. “It wasn’t a pay-per-view situation with celebrities. You would see someone at a concert or a restaurant and say, ‘Oh, hey, come to my show.’ And they would. Today, everything is so managed. Everyone has an agent for one thing and an agent for another. There’s no spontaneity. But I think there’s this interest in the ’90s because of two things: how music and fashion really overlapped organically, and how there was also just this real sense of camaraderie."

The “you had to be there” of it all is pretty maddening for style fans who weren’t born yet. Even those of us who were school kids watching Sui’s designs from the pages of magazines instead of the streets of SoHo might be miffed by the idea that we’ll never experience the kind of community, creative freedom, and unfilmed fun that built Sui’s early foundations. In that sense, The Nineties x Anna Sui isn’t just a catalog of fashion history or a tidy pile of gotta-try-it outfit inspiration. It’s also a wistful dirge for a time when “How many followers do you have?” was a question for a cult leader, not a job interview candidate, and when friends of friends were real-life discoveries instead of Substack categories.

Of course, even the purest nostalgia has its limits. Back then, there was almost no body diversity on the runways, and even if you could fit into the clothes, there was no guarantee that you could buy them, since internet shopping didn’t fully exist yet. And while Sui spends pages describing her love of vintage hunts, she admits that there’s a certain relief now in using Google Images. “Sometimes you just don’t have time,” she says. “You need to find a certain bag. You need to find a certain dress. You Google it, and it’s right there. No waiting. You don’t even know how amazing that is!”

Still, the Detroit native acknowledges that the insatiable appetite for ’90s-era creative courage is something that keeps Gen Z up at night. In the book, Sui writes that “everyone has a chimera, which is a quest for the unattainable.” For the designer, the chimera is the vintage clothes, magazines, and photographs that she chases like dragons across flea markets and estate sales, hoping to find the Next Beautiful Inspiration for her Next Beautiful Show. For her fans, the chimera is a decade they will never experience with the Last Beautiful Clothes as proof that it all ever existed.

“That’s how so many of us in the ’90s thought about the ’60s, you know,” Sui says, when I try to express the throb in my throat. “We were all obsessed with it, like we’d missed everything!” She notes that she dealt with the feeling head-on in her 1999 “Folk” collection, the one ignited by documentary director Murray Lerner and his shaky, black-and-white footage of Dylan playing electric guitar. You can see the yearn-worthy mix of crochet shift dresses and woven suede blazers at the back of The Nineties: Anna Sui, which ends with photos of Dylan and Baez taken 30 years before Sui’s runway show—way back in 1969, Sui’s own chimerical year. It’s a message, Sui says, to calm down about what’s already happened. “Just make what you want, where you are, right now.”