Cranbrook Art Museum opens "The World of Anna Sui" retrospective with more than 100 looks

The looks that made Anna Sui one of the most distinctive voices in global fashion went on display this week in Bloomfield Hills, a short drive from the record shops, fabric counters, and vintage racks where she first learned to see clothes. "The World of Anna Sui," a retrospective of the Detroit-born designer's career, opened October 21, 2026, at Cranbrook Art Museum and runs through February 28, 2027.

The exhibition gathers more than 100 looks drawn from Sui's own archive, tracing a career that spans more than three decades. Sui, a Chinese American designer born in Detroit on August 4, 1964, and raised in Dearborn Heights and West Bloomfield Township, left Michigan for Parsons School of Design, presented her first runway show in 1991, opened her first SoHo flagship store in 1992, and won the CFDA's Perry Ellis Award that year and its Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

This is the eighth stop on a traveling exhibition that began at London's Fashion and Textile Museum in 2017 and has since reached Tokyo, New York's Museum of Arts and Design, Shanghai, Fort Lauderdale, Charlotte, and Phoenix — and it is the one where the subject grew up.

Raised on Michigan racks

"I'm thrilled because I have, still, so many roots here," Sui said.

Those roots are specific. As a child, Sui spent time with her mother at Hudson's downtown Detroit store, drawn especially to its fabric and pattern counters, where she studied fabrics and imagined the clothes she could make from them. She has recalled shopping a Detroit east-side vintage store where a paper grocery bag of secondhand clothes — beaded 1940s dresses, jackets, and coats — could be filled for five dollars.

Sui has described Detroit as a highly cultured city with sophisticated stores, major concert venues, and thrift shops, and has said those experiences came out in her collections; she still visits the Royal Oak flea market and vintage stores when she returns to Michigan. Her designs, by her own account, combine flea market, rock and roll, and a lot of history. The music she heard growing up — the MC5, Iggy Pop, the Stooges, Led Zeppelin, and the city's concert posters — shaped her later designs for rock musicians and concertgoers, and she attended those concerts herself.

On the racks at Cranbrook

The retrospective is organized around 12 recurring archetypes in Sui's work: Americana, Androgyny, Fairytale, Grunge, Mod, Hippie/Rockstar, Nomad, Punk, Retro, Schoolgirl, Surfer, and Victorian. In the Retro and Victorian rooms, a visitor meets the eye that once filled paper grocery bags with beaded 1940s dresses, jackets, and coats for five dollars on Detroit's east side. Dennis Nothdruft, who curated the original exhibition at London's Fashion and Textile Museum, said, "Anna's work has always reflected her vision of a complete world".

The Cranbrook presentation also includes Detroit-specific additions shown here for the first time: the black-and-yellow employee uniforms Sui designed with Jack White for Third Man Records in 2012, and the Anna Sui Arcadia Blossom Babydoll Minidress worn by Olivia Rodrigo for her third studio album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.

Chief Curator Laura Mott adapted the show for Michigan with Kat Goffnett and Katy Kim. Sui's family also has ties to Cranbrook Schools. That makes the stop a homecoming in both directions: the looks come back, and so does Michigan's claim on the designer who wore them.

"It means so much to me to be able to have it here, because I really want, especially students and people that are aspiring to design, to really understand that they can do it too," Sui said.

Plan your visit

Cranbrook Art Museum, at 39221 Woodward Avenue in Bloomfield Hills, is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Hours are Wednesday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Friday through Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with free admission on Thursdays. General admission is $12, student admission is $8, children 12 and under are free, and reduced admission is available for Detroit residents and seniors. Guided exhibition tours are $22 including museum admission ($5 for ArtMembers), offered on November 20, December 4 and 18, 2026, and January 15, February 5, and February 19, 2027.

Sui's visit also included plans for Detroit pop-up shops, including one at Third Man Records, the label she has designed uniforms for.