Anna Sui got fired for a Macy's ad, then built a label on $300
In August 1979 a full-page Macy's advert in The New York Times showed clothes Anna Sui had designed on the side. Her day-job boss saw it and fired her immediately. With $300 in savings and a corner of her living room, she started the fashion house that bears her name.
Sui grew up in Detroit as a second-generation Chinese American, born on August 4, 1955. Her parents had met as students at the Sorbonne, her father studying engineering and her mother painting. On her mother's side she descends from the Fang clan of Tongcheng in Anhui, famous for scholars; she is an eighteenth-generation descendant of the poet Fang Bao, founder of the Tongcheng school of prose. Her maternal grandfather was a Chinese diplomat married to a Japanese woman.
She knew by the age of four that she wanted to design clothes. Her mother took her fabric shopping, and Sui dressed her Barbies and her brothers' action figures in leftover scraps, later mixing and matching sewing-pattern pieces to invent her own outfits. As a teenager she read in Life magazine about two Parsons graduates who moved to Paris and opened a boutique with backing from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the story gave her a target.
At Parsons she befriended the photographer Steven Meisel, and after two years she left for a job at the juniors label Charlie's Girls in 1975, styling Meisel's shoots on the side. She worked for several sportswear firms while sewing at home, driven by a wish to dress rock musicians and their fans. A five-piece collection shown at a trade show while she was at Glenora caught the eye of Bloomingdale's and Macy's, which led to that fateful advert.
For years she ran the business from her flat, taking odd jobs and ploughing every dollar back in. The 1980s belonged to power dressing from houses like Chanel and Versace, so Sui aligned herself instead with the grunge scene alongside Marc Jacobs. Around 1987 Annette Breindel took her into the Annette B showroom, and she moved to the garment district. Japanese partners such as Onward Kashiyama followed. In 2009 the CFDA gave her its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award, an honour earlier given to Yves Saint Laurent.
Source: Anna Sui
