Debbie Harry, the New York Dolls’s David Johansen, Marc Jacobs, and Sofia Coppola and her husband Thomas Mars, the lead singer of Phoenix, were all in attendance at the Strand’s Rare Book Room tonight for Anna Sui’s fall 2024 show. Gen Z can have their influencers; Sui has people of influence.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple was a reference for Sui’s fall collection, as were the first editions of Virginia Woolf. She filtered these through her own fashion origin story, adding ’90s grunge stylings and a soundtrack stacked with hits by Sonic Youth, the Breeders, Smashing Pumpkins, and Elastica. It’s always a history lesson at Sui’s shows, but this season her mash-ups were particularly multi-layered, the orange tweed of a kilt conjuring the 1960s and the fleece of the Fair Isle patterns evoking the gorpcore-y here-and-now.
Sui is a vintage hunter par excellence; if she’s erasing and eliding timestamps, that doesn’t mean she’s not fully aware of the origin story of each and every one of her prints and silhouettes. She also happens to be a keen student of street style, and her recent observations—of young men wearing babushkas, and of young everyone wearing vintage—influenced the styling of this collection. That started with the souvenir scarves that accessorized many of the looks, and included the hand-dyed retro slips by Eveliina, a vintage lingerie dealer she’s met on the circuit, that she mixed with her own designs.
When Sui had her store on Mercer Street, she kept a rail of vintage pieces in stock. She’s recently added a selection of Eveliina’s lingerie one-of-a-kinds to her e-commerce site, alongside archival pieces from her own past collections. Her trick is the way she makes even the most direct of references feel wantably au courant. This season the looks at the top of the list are a panné velvet Bloomsbury-blue flower print jacket and skirt worn with a Lurex rugby stripe tee, and a transparent paillette embroidered net tank paired with silver sequin pants that mesh the 1920s and the 2020s. The crowd seemed slow to disperse after the show, as if everyone was reluctant to step off Sui’s time machine.