Anna Sui, Fashion’s Favorite Daughter, Gets Her Day in the Sun

You have said that newsweeklies provided a cultural lifeline for you and used Life magazine pages to demonstrate your response to its reports on the “counterculture.”

I remember seeing an article on Mia Fonssagrives and Vicky Tiel doing the costumes for “What’s New Pussycat?” and I was obsessed with the sketches they ran. Many years later I went back and read it again and realized that Mia was Irving Penn’s stepdaughter.

How did those early influences ultimately inform your work?

In the opening section, there’s a coat belonging to Baby Jane Holzer, who was a Warhol superstar and one of my idols who later became a close friend. I knew who Baby Jane was from Life. They ran a story about underground fashion and there she was in some incredible dress and the most incredible hair. Diana Vreeland loved her and gave her this column in Vogue where she would cover the new boutiques. That was Jane’s assignment — to shop. For the show, we borrowed this purple fur coat of hers that I’d seen in an exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida called “To Jane, Love Andy: Warhol’s First Superstar.” It’s the coat she wore to the Frazier-Ali fight. She wore it with a pair of Chelsea Cobbler boots and hot pants underneath. Jane was never the type to wear a plain mink coat.

But how did you meet?

Steven photographed her and told me she was at the studio and for some reason invited me over.

You mean the fashion photographer Steven Meisel?

I’ve known Steven since we were both at Parsons School of Design. In those days, design students were not allowed to go to the school lunchroom because we weren’t supposed to mingle with the art school riffraff. But I would sneak down, and Steven would be holding court. A friend was talking to him and mentioned that they were all going out dancing and that I should come, too. I went with my boyfriend to Tamburlaine and saw Steven with his entourage and he said, “Ditch the boyfriend. Come sit with us.”

Of course. I kept the friendship with Steven. In those days, I had an apartment in the city, and Steven grew up in Queens and was still in school, so my place became club central.

Source: The New York Times

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Keywords:

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