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The world of Anna Sui is instantly recognizable. Glossy lacquer, roses, prints, purple, a bit of vintage—you can spot these touches throughout her eponymous fashion line, home, and beauty collection. It’s all something she’s been dreaming of since she was four years old.
“I've always been a girly girl,” Sui tells me over lattes in her Manhattan showroom. “In my mind, fashion designers didn’t just make clothing—they had to have everything, and that included a beauty line. Like how Chanel had her fragrance and Mary Quant had her cosmetics.” That’s how the fragrance and beauty arm of her business was born exactly a quarter of a century ago.
Sui launched her first fragrance, Classic Eau de Toilette, 25 years ago. It’s all so iconically her: Purple juice (which smells of rose, sandalwood, and bergamot) peeks out of a black lacquer window frame bottle. “The fact that people are still wearing the first fragrance I ever launched means a lot,” she says.
In the quarter of a decade since, Sui has played with both packaging and product. Collections of nail polish and twinkling eye glitter come in that same shiny black packaging, while more than forty fragrances—housed in bottles shaped like hot air balloons and ice cream sundaes and with both fantastical and fantastic names like Sui Dreams—have been borne from Sui’s dreams into reality.
Today, the newest collection, named Wild Wonder and inspired by adventure, launches in tandem with her spring ’25 collection. The five bottles sitting on the table in front of us are almost Plain Jane in comparison to past designs. Sui can clearly read my mind as she starts to talk about the bottles.
“This milestone felt like time for a clean slate,” she says while picking up one of the glass bottles. It has subtle commonalities to the Anna Sui Classic—see-through flacon, a rose topper—but it stops there. The bell jar-shaped bottles, which are each filled with a different color of pastel juice, are almost minimalist in design. “All of the colors of the bottles are perfectly represented in the collection,” she says while gesturing to the clothing racks around us.
The entire collection (with names like Dew Fields, Electric Whisper, Mystic Luna, Thorn of a Rose, and Utopia Mist) is centered around roses. Inside, there's a different rose note in each fragrance, like tea rose or Damascus, anchoring it. From there, the fantasy evolves. “Be sure to ask her what fragrance she wears,” Vogue Runway’s Nicole Phelps says when she hears I am interviewing Sui. “She always smells incredible.” It’s the peach-hued Electric Whisper, her favorite of the five. The fruity-floral scent is inspired by joyful moments and has notes of blueberry and rose lychee.
After sniffing my way through the Wild Wonder collection, I return to the Classic Anna Sui scent and remember there are roses there, too. That’s when I realize the Wild Wonder collection is five different versions of the Classic girl, 25 years later. Cheers to that.
