Every visit to Anna Sui’s studio is a fashion lesson. This season, she was offering instruction in the kebaya, a traditional garment, part-shirt/part-jacket and often embroidered, worn by women in Southeast Asia that, you could argue, hasn’t been co-opted by western designers as regularly as the cheongsam or kimono. A pair of vintage kebayas in delicate and beautiful cotton voile were one of Sui’s references this season. A wall of her office was pinned with other inspirations: a Peranakan bowl in electric pastels (like “Chinese porcelain on acid,” she said), Impressionist paintings, and Danielle Bhavya Winter’s dreamy digital images of butterflies.
Together, all of this translated into a resort collection that skewed youthful and whimsical in trademark Sui fashion. After connecting with Winter, Sui printed her butterflies on a thigh-scraping metal mesh dress. Other party dresses were equally abbreviated and came trimmed with feather hems. A silver foil sleeveless jacket and mini were inspired by a gold version that Linda Evangelista wore on the designer’s runway in her supermodel heyday.
Lately Sui has been tapping into Gen Z’s anemoia for the 1990s and early ’00s. Here, she slipped baby tees under slip dresses and cut cargo pants to slouch off the hips in ways that will be recognizable to people old enough to actually remember those years.
A burnout velvet smock dress in a floral evocative of Monet’s Giverny is shown in the lookbook with a vest whose patchwork effect was achieved, Sui marveled, by computer. That’s one thing that’s different between fashion now and fashion then. Sui’s gift as a fashion savant is imbuing her vintage obsessions with a universal appeal. Years from now when someone stumbles across her silk jacquard nightgown embellished with “aged” lace, they’re likely to be just as jazzed as she was this week about those antique kebayas.
