Anna Sui: The Passion Of Anna

"Whoa, girl," I say.

"I know. I was obsessed with it. I used to dress my dolls up for our own version of the Academy Awards. I made all the costumes, I wrote all the speeches, I orchestrated the whole thing..."

"Jesus, it was probably better than the real thing..."

"I'll tell you," Sui says, sounding genuinely upset, "I was really sad when I thought, Okay, you're finally too old to play with these dolls."

"How old was that?"

"I think it was 13."

"Yeah," I say, "you either think about sex or about Barbie. I'm not sure you can do both."

"With the models, it's so much better, though, because they move and they're funny, and we get to see how the clothes look on real, live people."

"What do you think about Hollywood style?"

"It's a little casual for me. I think everyone is really downplaying it, which I think New York went through during the punk days. If you wore more than a black T-shirt and black jeans you were..."

"Overdressed?" I supply.

"Yeah, and really out of style. And I think in L.A. that's going on, too. I can understand it for the climate, but I think that it would be great if somebody outrageous really started dressing up again. That would be so perfect. I love old movies. If I could, I'd stay home and watch AMC all the time. In the '30s and '40s, no one was afraid to be overdressed, that's for sure. I like to look at old movies for inspiration. Like the collection last fall was all Victorian, but I wasn't into the hoop skirts. In the '30s they did a bias cut and everything was really slinky, so when I saw Becky Sharp, I felt like my prayers had been answered--there was my solution of how to do Victorian in a modern way!"

"Now that you have the store in L.A., do you go out there and..."

"I love it out there," Sui almost shouts. "I have all these friends..."

"Actors or civilians?"

"Well, all kinds. You meet people in the funniest ways. Like [photographer] Steven Meisel and I had seen this film on cable, The 'In' Crowd, and we loved Donovan [Leitch]. He was so adorable. We decided we had to find him. Steven was doing the Dolce & Gabbana campaign and he found Donovan's agent and ended up photographing him. Then, that season, I introduced men's clothing for the first time, and the person I wanted to model the line was Donovan. Donovan and I are both Leos, so we get along so well. We barely have to talk. It's just like he knows if I'm looking at him like, you know, cool it Donovan, then he'll just really chill out. And then he introduced me to Sofia [Coppola]. Every time I'd go to L.A., I'd get together with all the kids out there and we'd go to dinner. Through them I met Zoe Cassavetes and their whole circle of friends... lone Skye and the Beastie Boys, and the circle just gets larger and larger. Now when we go to restaurants, it's two tables instead of one. After my last show, I was out to dinner with Sofia and a bunch of our friends and her father happened to be at the restaurant. He came over and told me how much he enjoyed the show. I was flabbergasted to have Francis Coppola tell me that he enjoyed my show."

"Zoe [Cassavetes] had a dinner party for me at her house. And I got to see a real Hollywood house. It's amazing, with all the photographs of John and Gena [Rowlands]. Just looking at all the film history on those walls. It was just so glamorous."

Sui, the middle child of middle-class Chinese immigrants, was born and raised in Michigan where, as we all know, there are a lot of cars but no glamour.

"My whole sense of glamour is heightened because I was always looking for glamour, as if it were going to pop its head out around the next corner. I always felt that all the best things, the greatest times, were happening somewhere else without me. I think all my clothes somehow stem from the feeling that I never got to live in New York in the '60s, never got to go to London when it was really cool, never got to shop at Abracadabra."

And now, when the most glamorous women in the world are photographed wearing Anna Sui's designs?

"I'll tell you two things that happened that made my heart stop. We got a phone call from Pauline, Cher's assistant, saying that Cher wanted to see the clothes. So we sent a video and she bought all these clothes. When I opened the store in L.A., she came to the opening. She didn't RSVP, but she showed up anyway. And I was so excited, I was flipping when someone told me she was there. And I, like, flew across the room and said, 'Hi Cher, I'm Anna.' And she said, 'Oh, Anna, I know who you are. I've got tons of your clothes.' I was dying.

"And then, when I won the CFDA Award, just as we were going up to go backstage to receive the award, I was walking and someone goes, 'Anna, Anna,' and it was Donna Karan and Barbra Streisand, like, running after me! And Donna said, 'I want you to meet my friend Barbra.' And I was, like, passing out, I was nervous enough as it was, and then to meet Barbra Streisand. .. And she said, 'How can I get your clothes? I saw you on TV today and I don't know how to get your clothes.' And so I told her we'd send her the videos. In my wildest dreams, I just never thought... these were all the people that I just idolized, and suddenly to meet them and have them interested in my clothing. Five years ago I never would have believed what my life is like now. Never. Not in my wildest dreams."

"You sound like you feel like you're living out your favorite fairy tale."

"Ever since I was a little kid, all I wanted was to wear a crown. I used to fight with my mother before every school picture because I'd want to wear my birthday dress and her rhinestone necklace. Then I was Queen Isabella in a school play, and they gave me a tiara to wear. It was a defining moment. Of course, that became the other thing I wanted to wear in my school picture. It all had to do with the fantasy I had of being excited."

"If you like playing royalty so much," I say, "how come when you came out at the end of your show, you looked like you wanted to bolt?"

"Because, first, you can't believe that people like it. And then you can't believe that you're standing there with the most beautiful girls in the world and everyone's looking at you, and you're thinking that you're the shortest, ugliest thing. And of course I'm always in black and everyone else is in color, so I feel like this little ant. My mother always says, 'Did you bring your high heels?' "

"Like it would make a difference."

"Exactly. But when I'm in the store on the weekends, I put on my tiara and I feel like I'm the queen. That's when I'm at my best."

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Martha Frankel wrote "Tips for Girls" in the June Movieline.

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