Anna Sui Quotes

Film has always been a really good tool for me to communicate emotion about why I create a collection. I'm probably one of the first designers to make short films.

I came from a different world from other designers because I already had such a strong fan base that was interested in fashion. You have to give the little divas something.

A lot of my peers don't think about collaborating the way I do. My approach is to imagine my world. The Jason Wu woman isn't just floating around in a beautiful dress. I like to know where she's going, what she likes. I'm not just in the fashion business. I'm in the lifestyle business.

The music business inspires designers, and designers inspire the music business.

Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies.

One of my best friends, Stephen Sprouse, Bill Dugan, and I worked designing clothes, doing every conceivable thing. New York was a really intoxicating period for me, literally and figuratively. There was a lot of overlap with Andy Warhol, Studio 54, and Halston.

When I joined Gucci in 2002, I immediately wanted to make a research trip into the archives because I'd heard about how incredible they were, but I never had the opportunity to visit them.

I think the relationship is very tenuous between fashion and art. Many designers have built relationships with artists, which is not something I personally did. But it's true, sometimes you see artists working for a designer or a brand on some specific project or taking care of their environment and making an amazing store.

I wanted to design a line based on Hollywood's Golden Era. I talked with Stephen Burrows and with Willi Smith and with one or two other people, but it just seems like such a hard field to break into. I need someone like Calvin Klein's manager to get behind me!

Whether it's color palettes for my apparel collection or materials for handbags and shoes or inspiration for fine jewelry, traveling expands your mind and opens you up to different things you haven't seen before.

I see different artists making clothing lines and people respected it.

We can license our intellectual property to new customers and expand agreements with existing ones over time and more.

It's so hard to do fittings [for Yeezy] because we want to do things that are inspiring, that people could look at and say, "Wow, I like that color palette, I could put that together." And there are so many images of things that it's almost impossible to have your clothes go up against the amount you're seeing and carry it into one language.

One of my first fashion clients was Calvin Klein. We did his first freestanding stores. He was very exact and precise. But talk about high-fashion people who brand themselves!

We're always looking for ways to extend all of our intellectual property. We've seen that's what happened with 'Harry Potter' and 'The Lord of the Rings.'

If you have sold the film rights to somebody, take your money and leave. If the producers need you, they will call you. But you have to be careful about who you are selling your book to, and ensure that it is not tampered with.

The New York world is definitely geared toward fashion. So many people work in the fashion industry, photography, all sorts of satellite businesses that have to do with it, so there's no way that it can't affect you, and it just kind of makes you think with more of a fashion edge.

After my first fashion week, there were so many brands approaching us, and we said 'No' 90 per cent of the time. We didn't care about making a lot of money - it seemed so short term. We've always wanted to create something bigger.

I may not be in the office as much as I was at the start of the business but when a new range is launched - and we have two, a spring/summer and an autumn/winter collection - each year, all designs come through me first to make sure I am happy with them.

American and Italian women stimulate designers to do new things.

I know I wasn't allowed to go to fashion school; I can't cut a dress like Galliano, right? But I had enough wherewithal to go to that studio on my first collection and bring Kim, [stylist] Christine Centenera, Ian Connor, Theophilus London, Virgil Abloh...they all came down to [Vetements/Balenciaga designer] Demna Gvasalia's studio that night and hung out.

Making clothes that everybody can wear is also something that stimulates me a lot, because I have this edgy, fashion-y part, but I am also totally involved with a brand that is about how people dress, and what they want. And it's a whole other look you can have on the street. It's exciting because it speaks to the other part of my job and what my passion is. A designer wants to make something useful for as many people as possible.

Fashion as a whole is a farce, completely. The people behind it are perverted, the styles are created by freaked out people, just natural weirdos. I know this because I worked with all those people while I was modeling.

Everything I have is ready to wear, but I have the ability to have different options within the same brand. I have the Theyskens' Theory collection where it's a personal approach to how I build the collection where I fuse more fashion-y ideas and it has my name on it. So it's really something very research- and labor-intensive. And then I have the Theory brand where I infuse all points of view about fashion at large, and it's more global. It's really about making something succeed. You have an instant relationship with stores, and with sales teams, and people that are in the place.

I could never before say that I loved color or that I understood color. But Oscar de la Renta opened up a side of my brain.