Anna Sui gets a degree, and her due
With her work recognised by Parsons School of Design at the New School, veteran fashion designer Anna Sui receives an honorary doctorate in fine arts
‘The robes are polyester,” Anna Sui said, with a look of mock horror as she shrugged on a gown for a college graduation ceremony roughly four decades late.
It was in the early 1970s that Sui overheard two seniors in the lunchroom of Parsons School of Design mention an opening for a designer at Erika Elias’ neo-hippie fashion label Charlie’s Girls. Racing home, she threw together a portfolio, applied for the job and got it. Then, at 21, she promptly dropped out of school.
Instead of getting a diploma, she set off on a journey that saw her through four largely successful decades in fashion – a period during which she built a namesake label with 50 stores around the world, earned a lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America and would find herself the subject of the first full-scale career retrospective of an American designer at a British museum, an event titled “The World Of Anna Sui” and accompanied by a coffee-table monograph with the same name.
Now, Sui was satisfying the long-held desire of her mother, Grace, by getting a college degree. Not just any degree: This was an honorary doctorate in fine arts, awarded by the Parsons School of Design at the New School before thousands of New School graduates and their families, all crowded in beneath the retractable roof of Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens.
Outdoors, temperatures hovered in the unseasonal low 90s. Inside the stadium was a heat suggestive of the hinges of hell.
“I don’t know about this,” she said, looking dubious during a preceremony rehearsal. “There might be some people going down.”
Considering that since starting her label in 1991, Sui has worked with the world’s most celebrated models, from Kate Moss to Gigi Hadid, and has staged some of the more memorable shows in New York fashion history (to wit: Dave Navarro in a lace-trimmed camisole); and that she numbers among her close friends a sizeable percentage of the industry’s temperamental elite, she appeared surprisingly unfazed by it all – not the heat, the crowds or pressure of delivering suitably noble and uplifting commencement remarks.
She seemed, if anything, less humbled by a valedictory experience than curious about what there was to take away from it besides a scratchy polyester gown and an unflattering tasselled cap.