Is there a New York fashion week show more fun than Anna Sui’s? Not this season there isn’t.
The city, she’s noticed, feels alive with new nightspots, places like Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel, and Maxime’s, the members club uptown. “Those places are scenes,” she said. “You see people you know. It’s the way it used to be, instead of going to a restaurant and asking, ‘who are all these investment bankers?’”
With apologies to the financiers reading this, Wall Street types aren’t typically known for their adventurous sense of fashion, and Sui is lobbying hard against Casual Friday khakis, Patagonia vests, and the tyranny of athleisure. She’s pro-statement coat, usually with a faux fur trim, and the only thing she likes better than a matching ensemble is a smashingly clashing one, like a jaguar spot twinset paired with a gilded tulips brocade party dress.
The sameification of New York fashion stops with Sui, but her starting point this season was actually a trip to London, where she saw a Design Museum exhibition about the legendary nightclub Blitz (subtitle “The Club That Shaped the ’80s”). “I remembered that moment because I was so into the punk scene, and I went to London, and who do I see but Steve Strange. He had been a punk and suddenly he was a [New Romantic] buccaneer. He had completely different hair, all this makeup,” Sui recounted backstage. “And it was so exciting to see that—when style just completely changed and everything looked outmoded and there was something completely new.”
Sui had Strange’s new wave group Visage on the soundtrack, along with the Psychedelic Furs, Love and Rockets, and the Human League. And just like that, I wanted to ditch my sensible Saturday afternoon sweater, jeans, and boots in favor of a black and silver floral brocade pantsuit with faux fur trim at the jacket cuffs and pant hems.
