Designer Anna Sui Brings Her Distinctive Style Home to Detroit in Spectacular Fashion

Hudson’s, the grand department store in downtown Detroit where a young Anna Sui used to shop with her mother for fabrics, is long gone, as is the Dearborn Heights of her childhood. But not Cranbrook, the iconic school and museum complex designed by Eliel Saarinen in wealthy suburban Bloomfield Hills, where Sui’s father, an architect himself who had fled Communist China, liked to take his family and out-of-town visitors on Sunday outings to marvel at its iconic flow across 319 acres of undulating green.

“This is my hometown,” Sui told Galerie ahead of the opening of “The World of Anna Sui,” an exhibition organized by the Fashion and Textile Museum in London as it culminated its worldwide tour at the Cranbrook Art Museum. An overview of more than 100 vivid looks from an eclectically candy-colored, globally researched, and rock-and-roll glamorous design career, it crackles with the super-charged energy that first came to the fashion world’s notice as Sui breathed the spirit of ‘90s underground culture into a debut show cheekily held in an abandoned Garment District showroom three-and-a-half decades ago.

It’s above all a reminder, Sui said, that Detroit was always among her earliest inspirations, starting with “handbills by artists like Gary Grimshaw from rock concerts at the Grande Ballroom that a friend got for me because I wasn’t old enough to go myself. Later, when I started going to galleries, I began collecting the larger posters, because by then I could afford them. A lot of them are hanging in the show.” 

And of course, Sui added, “There was Motown.” She would listen to it “on singles on my little Singer record player,” she said, poring over Diana Vreeland’s Vogue as the Supremes’s sequined minis danced in her head, and the bright kicky fare of late ’70s Seventeen magazine trained her eyes on Parsons School of Design. It admitted her as a junior in high school. A friendship with Detroit-based musician Mike White led to an album cover but also a black-and-yellow dress uniform for his Third Man Records store chain, prominently displayed in the show. Mick Jagger would be her first menswear client.  

She has labeled her Spring/Summer 2027 season “Wonderment”—sent down the runway with fairytale fantasies of Art Nouveau mermaids, Bloomsbury princesses, and heiresses clad in Chinoiserie lace—and described it as “the moment of enlightenment that comes with discovering something new.” A backward glance, “The World of Anna Sui” nevertheless does the same.

“The World of Anna Sui” at Cranbrook Art Museum from October 21 through February 28, 2027