“Clothes have to be fun; otherwise, who wants to bother?” Anna Sui once said in Vogue. Three-plus decades into her career, this recipient of the CFDA’s Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award has yet to lose her sense of play, misplace her rose-colored glasses, or repudiate her belief that “you need the very theatrical and the very avant-garde to perpetuate fashion.”

With each runway show, she aims to take her audience “on a journey.” She has always been one to focus on the fantasy aspect of fashion, but Sui is very much a product of the needle-and-thread, hard-knocks industry of Seventh Avenue: She built her business slowly—working for a decade from her apartment. Her own fashion odyssey began when she was a kid in Michigan, collecting inspirational tear sheets in overstuffed “genius files,” which, nearly half a century later, she still references. “My clothes,” she told Vogue in 1992, “are about nostalgia and memories of my own childhood.”

In 1973, Sui moved to New York to pursue her passion at Parsons School of Design. In the ’70s and early ’80s, she became part of the nightclubby downtown scene that also spawned photographer Steven Meisel and graffiti designer Stephen Sprouse.

It wasn’t fun, but grit—and a little help from her friends—that tipped the scales in Sui’s favor in 1991, when she finally presented her first runway show. It was a breakthrough moment, filled with supermodels and frolics. Soon Irving Penn was photographing Anna Sui pieces for Vogue, which declared in 1992: “The real secret of Sui’s success is price. No item in the collection sells for more than $400.”

She is a pioneer of the contemporary niche. Sui’s explanation is typical of her upbeat attitude: “You can’t have fun in a $3,000 jacket; it’s just too prissy. Besides, fashion changes, and that’s what’s interesting. If you spend a lot of money, then you’re committed to your clothing.”

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