Dolly Girl

Anna Sui's fragrance Dolly Girl.
Channeling her inner China Doll?

I posted on Anna Sui and her designs at the New York Fashion Week. There is very little biographical information on Sui other than that she was born in Detroit Michigan, and her parents lived in Paris before they settled in the US.

Anna Sui and Family:
[Image Source]

[Image Source]

Neither of these sources give full information on the members of this family, if they are all indeed part of the family. Why post images without telling us what or who they depict? Anyway, the best I can come up with is this:

- Sui's parents are both Chinese, so the elderly Chinese woman in the second image is most likely her mother.

- Various biographical sources write that Sui has two brothers, so it is likely that the two older Chinese men are her brothers.

- One is sitting close to a white woman holding a young child, in the top photograph. She looks like she's the same woman with the child in the bottom photograph, standing next to a man holding another child. These children could be their children, they do have the half Caucasian, half Chinese features, so they must be part of the family at some generational level.
- The other Chinese man, with the his hand on the young girl's shoulder in the bottom photograph, at the far right, could be the girl's father.

- The two young girls in the two photographs are likely the same girls. They also look half Caucasian, half Chinese, and may be the children of either one of the brothers - Sui, as far as I can find out, is not married, and has no children.

- The boy in the top photograph, sitting second from the right, looks like the same boy in the bottom photograph, sitting in the middle of the front row. He also looks half Caucasian, half Chinese, and could be the son of either one of Sui's brothers.

The boy next to him in the top photograph looks Chinese (not mixed). It's hard to deduce who he could be. I'm assuming that the Chinese-looking boy is not part of the family since all the other younger members of the photograph look like they have some mixture.

- The boy in the bottom photograph at the far right looks like a mix (Hispanic and Chinese?), and it is also hard to deduce who he could be, but it could be that the Chinese part resulted with darker skin than the others.

- Is the white man standing at the far left in the bottom photograph Sui's husband/etc? He looks like he's part of the family, and perhaps doesn't want the publicity that goes with being associated with a famous person, and may be keeping out of the radar.

My point really is that Chinese families are now a mix, of mostly white and Chinese. And it is mostly Chinese women and white men who make this mix, as Sui's photographs seem to show.

Sui's Inspirations:

Sui's inspirations are numerous and eclectic (this is another way of saying that she's promiscuously all over the place.) In another interview, she says:

"There’s something about the ‘60s. I love the color palette, and so much of the ‘60s was inspired by folk art but also the Victorian period, and I love that," Sui said in an interview.

Rock and Roll and Punk Rock is another theme that comes up. According to Fashion Encyclopedia:

When Anna Sui started her own apparel company in 1980, her mission was to sell clothes to every rock 'n' roll store in the country. "It was right after the punk rock thing and I was so into that," said the designer, who has earned a reputation for bringing a designer's sensibility to wild-child, rocker clothes with a vintage spin.

Her enthusiasm runs the gamut from Art Deco (she also gratuitously adds in Art Nouveau) to Vienna’s Wiener Werkstätte, and an obsession with the1920s fashion illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, according this this:

Everyone’s talking about Copenhagen right now and a lot of people go there for research,” she offers. “I went to Finland and Stockholm but we didn’t have time to go! In Finland they had vintage Art Deco — there was a flea market there, really good old stuff, for nothing!” The Art Deco movement is just one of Sui’s enthusiasms, which run the gamut from textile maven Zika Ascher to obscure 1970s rock to patterns from Vienna’s Wiener Werkstätte at the turn of the last century. Each collection expresses the latest tangent of Sui’s curiosity (“If you saw my office, it’s shock full of inspiration — layers of inspiration!”), often trimmed in crochet, handmade lace and other decorative trims.

Rock stars and glam girls seem to be part of this 47-year-old's psyche. Here's what she says at her website:

People are attracted to my fashions because of all the elements I try to put into it -- There's always a very sweet feminine, girly aspect…a touch of nostalgia. There’s also the aspect of trendiness; the hipness I try to create by always adding a rock-and-roll coolness. There's always that ambiguity…the Good Girl/Bad Girl thing. All these facets have to go into my designs, or it doesn't look like "Anna Sui". Every product I put my name on has to personify the "World of Anna Sui". When a customer buys a tube of lipstick, it should give them the same excitement as buying a dress from my collection. If it doesn’t, then I'm not really doing my job.

And of course, China.

Growing up and learning about Chinese culture from my parents, and hearing them talk about all the different places they had lived…prepared me for thinking globally. This perspective took away any fears of being able to function in a foreign country. Their experiences were a gift to me.

This erratic, unfocused, state of mind is apparent in her work. As I wrote in the previous post on her designs at New York Fashion Week:

There's too much going on!.... When in doubt, keep adding, is usually the motto of the mediocre.

This is similar to what I wrote about another Asian fashion designer, Vera Wang:

Most brides still prefer their dresses in white (or ivory)[note: Wang is designing off-white, beige, grey and black wedding dresses], so I wonder how Wang even makes good profit off her bridal designs? Not surprisingly, she has branched out into "regular" fashion design (I'm getting tired of shoddy dresses thrown at us by mediocre and irresponsible designers), as well as standard home decor, which other designers have done better. I don't see any particularly stand-out products from any of her departments.

Sui also designs perfumes, which is standard fare for fashion designers, but here are the names of her fragrances, referencing her girly, rock and roll, hippy, good girl/bad girl, Chinese glam girl facets:

- Night of Fancy
- Flight of Fancy
- Live Your Dream
- Sui Love (as in Sui Generis?)
- Classic
- Forbidden Affair
- Rock Me!
- Rock Me! Summer of Love
- Sui Dreams
- Secret Wish
- Secret Wish: Magic Romance
- Dolly Girl (As in "China Doll?)

I go to my trusted online perfume connoisseurs at Fragrantica to see what the word is on Sui's perfume Dolly Girl. Below is what "missk" (Miss K?) writes. Her writing is lucid, and she doesn't seem to have the giddy opinions which seem to come mostly from teenage girls on the site, which this floral/fruity/juicy perfume seems to be geared toward:

I didn't have high expectations prior to testing this fragrance, and not surprisingly I wasn't blown away by this scent.

There was nothing unpleasant about it, but then again there was nothing overly wonderful about it either. Looking at all the unique and interesting notes listed, I'm wondering where all those notes were.

I could definitely not smell cinnamon or melon in the top notes, which is a damn shame, because those notes when blended with the apple and bergamot should have created something interesting. However, I was met with a scent that can only be compared to a cheap drugstore fragrance.

What is supposed to be a beautiful heart of florals, turns out to be so faint that you can hardly smell it. In fact, Dolly Girl hardly lasts at all. It's possibly one of the worst fragrances when it comes to lasting strength.

I didn't get any of the powderyness that everyone is describing here, instead I got a big jumbled mess of fruits and flowers, making it very difficult to distinguish any particular notes.

Although I find the bottle design creative, up close it looks rather cheap and tacky. Unfortunately there's nothing about Dolly Girl that I actually like. Even the name is a little ridiculous and childish.

I haven't tried the other fragrances in the Dolly Girl series, but here's hoping they are much better than the original.

Another Asian designer "almost" moment.

Sears, at the Eaton Centre has a stand, right by the escalators, with Anna Sui products. I always walk by them a little fascinated. Everything seems so over-exaggerated. Large black roses are carved on gaudy pink, yellow and reds plastic tubes, on a counter which looks more like a boudoir than a makeup stand. My first impression, when I saw this was not "Who is the designer?" but "What do these exaggerated colors and bottles really hide?" As in, "Is the product as good as the packaging?" It seems like fruity/floral/juicy concoctions for the perfume, geared at teen-agers like Vera Wang's Princess, and just another red - Vivid, as Sui blandly names her red lipstick.

Vivid