Gothic Glam at Anna Sui<\/p>\n
BY TIM BLANKS<\/p>\n
The charm and humour that illuminate her work were in full e\ufb00ect, but there was also a rich seam of sultry slink.<\/p>\n
NEW YORK, United States \u2014 Anna Sui described her spring collection as \u201cprissy and pastel and sweet\u201d but darkness got the better of her for winter \u2014 and the clothes were all the better for it. She insisted she\u2019s not wild about horror movies, but, in the name of research, she submerged herself in Italian giallo like Mario Bava\u2019s Blood and Black lace, and classic Hammer productions such as Countess Dracula, and the eerie Daughters of Darkness, with avant-garde French beauty Delphine Seyring playing an elegant vampire. The lurid posters for these movies \u2014 blood red, pitch black, lurid greens and yellows \u2014 were all over Sui\u2019s moodboard, alongside equally outr\u00e9 Guy Bourdin and Serge Lutens ad campaigns from the early \u201970s, and even a Vogue cover of a veiled Bianca Jagger, heavy-lidded, red-lipped, coming in for the kill.
\nIt was not the \ufb01rst time Gothic glam has been Sui\u2019s go-to, but she was prepared to consider the idea that, on this occasion, it might be a subliminal re\ufb02ection of her sense of the planet right now, a place of darkness and danger and crippling uncertainty. Her challenge was the same as usual however: how to spin all that input into her world, \u201cto make it beautiful and seductive\u201d, as she put it.
\nBut in her world, those ideas took on a di\ufb00erent, twisted life. Seduction was all about the allure of the strange. The Sui girl was Vampira, or the Black Dahlia, or a nubile young woman \ufb02eeing from the unwanted attention of a sapphic bloodsucker. Garren\u2019s hair, Pat McGrath\u2019s makeup, James Coviello\u2019s hats were exaggerated, cinematic. Fred Sanchez\u2019s soundtrack tinkled and swelled with classic horror soundtrack tropes (best of all, Yann Tiersen\u2019s Waltz of the Monsters).
\nIt\u2019s an enduring mystery that more people don\u2019t \ufb01nd the whole Sui package an object of desire. The charm and humour that illuminate her work were in full e\ufb00ect on Monday night (John Fluevog reactivated his cartoon-ish Munster heels specially for her) but there was also a rich seam of sultry slink. Everything was long
\n(except when it was black pleather rah-rah shorts). Sui actually called her elongated outerwear \u201cmaxi-coats\u201d and emphasised the proportion by pairing them with \u201chot-pants\u201d, and once she\u2019d banged that early-\u201970s gong, the rest of the collection fell into place as a dark, decadent romp, swaddled in sparkly capes, enthusiastically striding forth on embroidered platforms. But where Sui\u2019s skill as a stylist shines is that she has always been able to translate the innate theatricality of her fashion scenarios onto the street. Break down her lavishly layered looks and you\u2019d likely \ufb01nd a single, fearless piece for all seasons, like the black crepe sack dress sported by Adut Akech. Its sleeves were cu\ufb00ed in a sick chartreuse. It was gorgeous.\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gothic Glam at Anna Sui FEBRUARY…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fs-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fredericsanchez.com\/fredericsanchez\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}