Chase Sui Wonders Pulls From Aunt Anna Sui’s ’90s Archive at Sundance

Chase Sui Wonders brought a piece of Anna Sui’s late-’90s runway history to Park City on Friday, arriving at the “I Want Your Sex” premiere in a look straight from her aunt’s archive.

The actress and filmmaker wore a pale green, beaded lingerie-style slip dress pulled straight from Anna Sui’s fall 1998 runway. The faux-fur trimmed dress featured a matching fur-trimmed hood and thin vertical beadwork in gold, broken up with small turquoise beads, spaced down the skirt and concentrated more densely toward the hem.

Teardrop-shaped beads traced the empire seam at the bodice in a scalloped line, while additional turquoise beadwork formed repeating floral motifs along the lower skirt, finished with small gold drops.

Wonders completed the archival look with the original runway shoes: matching green velvet mules with rounded toes and gold flared heels, topped by plush gray fur cuffs. Gold embroidery formed a sunburst-like motif across each vamp, punctuated by a spattering of small beads in the center.

Wonders is the niece of Anna Sui, the daughter of Bobby Sui — the designer’s brother and longtime chief financial officer of the brand — and has frequently worn her aunt’s designs both on and off the red carpet. The choice to wear a full runway pull at Sundance showed off the designer’s long-standing practice of revisiting and recontextualizing her own archive — a strategy that has taken on renewed relevance as vintage Anna Sui continues to circulate among collectors and Gen Z celebrities, including Olivia Rodrigo and Dua Lipa.

Earlier runway images also keep circulating, from Naomi Campbell in Sui’s spring 1994 babydoll silhouette to widely reposted shots of Christy Turlington, Campbell and Linda Evangelista. By revisiting and reissuing its own history, the brand has kept the archive present-tense for a new generation of vintage-minded shoppers, including those drawn to resale as a sustainability-minded way to buy designer.

“I Want Your Sex,” directed by Gregg Araki, follows Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) after he lands a job with provocateur-artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) and gets pulled into a sexual dynamic that turns obsessive; Wonders plays his best friend and roommate, Apple.