Anna Sui SS26 at the Chelsea Hotel
The Chelsea Hotel, famously recounted by Patti Smith in her memoir Just Kids (published in 2010), reopened in 2022 after eleven years of closure. Anna Sui’s spring-summer 2026 collection focused on lived-in layering and dreamy patterns, and perfectly encapsulated the romantic history of the Chelsea.
Sui’s theme “Bohemian Boudoir” captured the lifestyle of those who called the Chelsea home for one reason: it was an artists’ enclave. Its past residents include: Mark Twain, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Uma Thurman, Betsey Johnson, Janis Joplin, and Bob Dylan. We have seen bohemia take over the last couple of seasons (of course, this is conventional for Sui), and this will continue throughout SS 2026. But, Sui has enhanced the expected lacey skirts and ruffly dresses to feel more authentically vintage reminiscent. I personally think Patti Smith would love this collection.
By choosing the Chelsea as her runway venue, Sui succeeded in capturing how a room can change a collection’s resonance with its audience. “It’s an iconic place and I wanted to celebrate New York again", Sui said. “It was a literary colony for writers, artists, and special people"(WWD).
Sui’s design approach mirrors how many who lived in the Chelsea may have dressed, uniquely using self-expression as a formative tool in their early success in New York.
The return of boho in recent seasons says a lot about the growing success of second-hand shopping platforms and the quest for authenticity of younger consumers, especially in New York and Paris. This is a counter-narrative to the rise of fast fashion, reflecting deeper cultural changes throughout the US and Europe. Sui’s work has always added to the dialogue on contemporary design’s relationship with societal shifts.
At the show, on the seat of each guest was a copy of “The Nineties X Anna Sui”, which will be released on September 16th. It is a photobook of images from Sui’s archive, compiled and edited by Ileen Gallagher with contributions from Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs. In the 90s, Sui was known for her baby-doll and slip dresses, loved by Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, and Madonna.
The book features an anecdote on Linda Evangelista being asked to leave the Vatican for wearing a Sui babydoll dress that was too short on her.
Positioned by someone who actually partly created the current 90s bohemian fashion comeback, “The Nineties X Anna Sui” was created out of pure demand from her fans. “People kept asking me to make it,” Sui Said to W. “You made the clothes you saw in your head, but couldn’t find anywhere else,” she says. “You knew what it should be. Nobody else could tell you.”
Sui has always been ahead of the current fashion climate, “Marc Jacobs even confesses his jealousy of Sui’s front rows in the 1990s, comparing them to ‘rock concerts’”.
Her designs continue to have a true expression of creative freedom that many designers struggle to achieve season after season.
Kate Moss, AW 1993
Naomi Campbell, SS 1993
In an interview with The Zoe Report in 2016, Sui said she is “a big supporter of the effort to save the traditional New York Garment District.”
In the same interview, she discussed Opening Ceremony’s 2016 reissue of her 1993 and 1994 grunge collections, which featured Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Kate Moss.
She said, “In the old days, I was able to find everything I needed right here in the neighborhood. Lots of the wonderful American-made suppliers of wools, trims and buttons have disappeared. I make a conscious effort to patronize those resources that still exist. It's important to me that most of my collection is made within five blocks of my office."
“The Nineties x Anna Sui isn’t just a catalog of fashion history or a tidy pile of gotta-try-it outfit inspiration. It’s also a wistful dirge for a time when “How many followers do you have?” was a question for a cult leader, not a job interview candidate, and when friends of friends were real-life discoveries instead of Substack categories.”
One of Sui’s most memorable runway moments is when Turlington, Campbell, and Evangelista spontaneously paused altogether during her spring-summer 1994 show because it represented the way genuine connection created media impact at the time, not industry connections.
Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista SS 1994 ‘The Holy Trinity’
Sui’s opinion on the current 90s nostalgia is that “so many of us in the ’90s thought about the ’60s, you know, we were all obsessed with it, like we’d missed everything!” (W Magazine)
As a vintage Sui lover, I wish I could have been at her show at the Chelsea, and alive for her entire ’90s presence, but we will just have to appreciate how much her designs can share about not only what is current, but what is coming.
xoxo,
Leah
@leahradnay
