Once upon a time, not so long ago—earlier this week, in fact—the internet got excited about a blue velvet princess dress with fur trim. The “drama” started when Casey Jackson posted that the dress was for sale on Poshmark. The woman who designed it, Anna Sui, wrote to Jackson asking if she could acquire it. Meanwhile, its purchaser, Ashley Narcisse, posted pictures of herself in the dress, which were then reposted with the question, “I mean would y’all sell it back to Anna Sui?” Memes followed, as did comments for and against either “side.” As this isn’t fiction, there really aren’t any “bad guys” in this story despite the stir it caused on Instagram. What the incident really speaks to is ’90s nostalgia, and how vintage clothes are valued both for individual expression and as historic, passdownable objects.
Now, freshly added to the Vogue Runway archive, is the complete fall 1998 collection that the dress in question belongs to. And here is its origin story, as told by Sui herself.
“[I remember when I was in school], for English class we were told to read a book and do a report about it. And so I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and wrote my book report on it. The teacher gave me an A- and wrote, ‘You are too old to be reading fairy tales.’
[For fall 1998 I wanted] to do a collection inspired by fairy tales, but also inspired by all the great illustrators of the 1900s. I had seen an exhibition in London about the Victorian fairy tale illustrators [that included] Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen; it was the most incredible and really moving exhibition that I had seen in a long time, and I just kept looking at those pictures, so then I thought, OK, I’ll do a collection like that.
It was all like a kid’s version of dress-up—with the cowboy with the big badge, and oversized hat, and chaps that were all studded—as if you were taking stuff out of the trunk and putting it on. I bought a lot of old fairy tale books from the 1920s and the illustrations were just so incredible. I had all those pictures up on my inspiration wall.
All the animal hats and everything came from looking at Walter Crane drawings of frogs and bears. I just thought it’d be really fun to do it almost from a kid’s perspective and make those [into] faux fur hats, so I called [the milliner] James Coviello and said, ‘We have to make these teddy bear hats.’ And I showed him a picture of one of the girl bands at the time that had knocked the stuffing out of a stuffed bear and made a hat out of it. I said, ‘Let’s do a fairy-tale version of this.’
And then, with Erickson Beamon, I said, ‘I want crowns, but let’s make fairy-tale versions of crowns. I showed them a lot of Art Nouveau jewelry, so they kind of based it on that, but in their way, with the beautiful gems that she [Karen Erickson] finds and there’s all this bent metal; they’re just extraordinary.
Kirsty Hume and Donovan Leitch met backstage at one of my shows, so that’s a fairy tale in itself. I went to their wedding, in 1997, and it was very Art Nouveau and Scottish Arts and Crafts, so that was part of the inspiration [for the show as well.]
There was a whole series of the fairy-tale princesses. I just loved the frosted velvet that we made all those dresses out of. It was a stretch velvet in these frosted colors and then we trimmed everything with faux fur. There was a lot of [it] throughout the collection. The show opened with those black and ginger folkloric dresses trimmed with faux fur fringes. And then we did inside out faux fur, like there’s that jacket that Amber Valletta’s wearing, which we trimmed like Lapland clothes. A piece of trivia: Liv Tyler bought the coat that Michele Hicks wore during the show, for her father, Steven Tyler. And Vincent Gallo got the jacket worn by Valletta.
One day, I read an article about Shakespeare and how in his time they would portray horses on stage. [They used] a pantomime horse that the actor would wear with suspenders over his shoulders. So I showed James [Coviello] the sketch of that, and I said, ‘Let’s make it out of all the materials that we’re using for this collection.’ [The result] was extraordinary—really, really extraordinary—and I remember all my nieces and nephews were little then and that was their favorite character in the whole show. The model’s name was Aki, and when he came on stage, they jumped up and screamed ‘Aki! Aki! Aki!’ and it was just so cute because he was really special for them.
I think [what happened on Instagram this week] is a generational thing; like my generation was obsessed with the ’60s and ’70s and the next generation was obsessed with the ’80s. Maybe it’s the time and that they didn’t get to experience it.
When I think about it now, it seems like the whole fashion world was much more intimate; we all knew each other. It wasn’t like a cast of like 10,000 because [the industry] wasn’t so global yet. And everything was more real; the front rows weren’t influencers that are paid to wear the clothes, it was friends of friends or so-and-so was dating so-and-so who happened to be a movie star so he was sitting in the front row and then he brings his buddy. Or I went to a concert and I asked the band [members] if they wanted to come to the show, or you would run into somebody on the street, like Jim Jarmusch, and say, ‘Do you want to come to the show?’ It was just much more organic, it wasn’t fabricated, and it wasn’t so corporate-everything, it was much more casual.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
