Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still

Revisiting Anna Sui’s legendary spring 1994 runway playlist

Sun 26 April 2026 6:00, UK

One of my personal favourite crossover moments between rock ‘n’ roll and fashion occurred during American fashion designer Anna Sui’s spring/summer 1997 runway show, when she had musician Dave Navarro walk in a purple silk camisole and leather trousers, with lace undergarments visible underneath.

At the time, Navarro was post-Jane’s Addiction, playing as the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The two met at a concert in San Francisco hosted by the Beastie Boys, where Jane’s Addiction had played, and Sui asked him if he would ever consider being a model in one of her shows, to which he said yes, but only if lingerie were to be involved.

“I was willing to experiment with Anna and just use it as an opportunity to explore different sides of my sensibilities and fashion sense,” Navarro explained to Vogue in 2017, “I’d already been experimenting plenty with androgyny, and it was a perfect fit.”

As Sui remembers in her book, The Nineties, a coffee table-sized archive of her zeitgeist-defining collections designed across the decade, “He flew in for his fitting and walked into our office, took off all his clothes, and he said, ‘You’re the artist. I’m the clay. Mould me’. Everybody in the room just about dropped dead.”

The runway moment became one of the most incredible of the era, a moment where, in Sui’s vision, music and fashion became one, and the possibilities for an authentic display of culture within the fashion industry felt exciting. “Music has always been an important inspiration, I am of that generation,” Sui wrote. She recalled watching Elvis Presley sing ‘Hound Dog’ on television and, as a child, being approached on the playground by a friend with a radio blasting The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. As Sui has enthused time and time again, she lived through the waves of rock ‘n’ roll that now live in cultural mythology: the British invasion, and the births of metal, grunge and hip-hop.

Rock ‘n’ roll remains her primary muse, as she parsed artistic innovations from both the music and the people who shaped it, notably, the women behind it all. She revered Anita Pallenberg, infamous muse to The Rolling Stones, without whom they would not look nor sound the way they do. “My number one influence for rock was Anita Pallenberg,” Sui wrote, “And then Keith Richards and the Stones and how they dressed, and the movie Performance”. The “girlfriends” and “wives-of”, in her eyes, held more power, undeniably influential in the very image of rock culture that enticed her from the beginning.

“By the time I got to New York, the style was glam,” she recalled, “I was friends with the band the New York Dolls, and they were wearing glitter, patent leather, platform shoes and makeup. And that’s right when Bowie broke as Ziggy Stardust.” Here, Sui was at the epicentre of one of rock and fashion’s most pivotal combined moments, and soon, her own designs would bridge the two subsets of culture even closer together.

Looking across Sui’s collections, the influence of music and music culture alike is most evident; her designs have the whimsicality of looking as though they could have been sourced from a vintage shop, and yet, they feel thrillingly futuristic. How could clothing sustain the best patterns, silhouettes, colours and overarching energies of the past, while remaining faithful to what the future had in store? In Sui’s designs, she harnesses the potential to transcend time.

Another favourite moment in Sui’s history came in 1994 when she debuted her spring/summer collection, centred on the theme of grunge, and against the backdrop of her signature purple-and-black colours, she described her collection as working “with punk iconography, but re-coloured in a more optimistic palette”. Her vision is amplified by her chosen tracklist, presented as a handwritten note included in her book that serves as a capsule of the era’s best in alternative and hip-hop.

Linda Evangelista opens the show wearing a denim two-piece buttoned shirt and skirt and a fuzzy panda bear cap atop her head, walking to Björk’s ‘There’s More to Life Than This’, then Naomi Campbell opens the ‘metallic’ portion of the collection, walking in a knit hat and halter top paired with a matching metallic skirt and combat boots, adapting her legendary walk to the beat of Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Been Caught Stealing’, a moment of foreshadowing for Sui.

Across the show are visions of stuffed animal heads worn as hats, baby doll dresses, pastels and florals contrast with monochromatic black, and pairs walking hand-in-hand as near mirror images of one another. At one moment, rock royalty Donovan Leitch (son of musician Donovan, of course), wearing a gold and silver outfit paired with goggles, spontaneously moonwalks to Cypress Hill’s ‘I Ain’t Going Out Like That’, and as the show closes with Iggy Pop’s ‘Louie Louie’, Sui appears in her customary all-black outfit and sunglasses, all smiles.

Her tracklist encapsulates the sonic influences from which her clothing comes to life, choices that not only reflect her personal tastes but honour the ways that music and fashion merge to form a cohesive fantasy for reality to extract inspiration from.