- Mattel is celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a brand new Barbie doll of Chinese language designer Anna Sui
- The doll is featured within the Inspiring Ladies Sequence, which has beforehand honored Kristi Yamaguchi and Anna Might Wong
- Sui tells PEOPLE how her Barbie got here collectively from the outfit to the glam
Anna Sui designs for the runway, for the celebs and, sure, even for Barbie dolls.
In 2006, the Chinese language-American trend icon collaborated with Mattel on the Boho Barbie, a figurine that encapsulated Sui’s signature bohemian aesthetic, however not the girl behind the seams. Now, nearly 20 years later, that’s all altering.
In the present day, Sui, 60, is the face of her very personal Barbie figurine featured in Mattel’s Inspiring Ladies Sequence and the second comes simply in time for Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month (Might 1-Might 31). It is a possibility that she tells PEOPLE she “by no means dreamed would occur.”
Sui immersed herself within the course of of making her personal doll and had “lots of enjoyable” doing it. “It was such a tremendous second after they mentioned, you possibly can select what physique sort you need, your pores and skin tone, your hair sort. All these issues had been within the collection of how we had been growing,” she says.
Mattel
What she and the staff additionally approached with precision was creating an outfit for mini Anna Sui. The doll comes glammed up in a grunge-forward starburst costume paying homage to certainly one of Sui’s 2007 collections, is decked out in equipment impressed by her private treasures and Spring 2025 designs and carries a miniature model of the Anna Sui Traditional Eau de Toilette perfume.
Sui’s signature glam — her bangs, her crimson lip, her black eyeliner (which she loves a lot she does her eyes up earlier than she hits the health club) and a colourful nail polish — come collectively to mirror the designer to the fullest. “That is me and that is how I really feel essentially the most snug. I believe that having that recognition of a glance is de facto essential. You form of, I do not know, turn into a caricature of your self,” explains Sui.
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From head to toe, Sui’s Barbie tells a narrative of perseverance. Rising up within the suburbs of Detroit as a toddler of Chinese language immigrants, she wasn’t surrounded by friends who regarded like her. However, she says, “I believe the truth that I used to be distinctive, I favored that. And so I pursued that and my type grew to become way more exaggerated even as soon as I moved to New York and began experimenting with appears to be like and make-up and garments…I favored the eye. I needed to face out.” A motto she at all times caught by: “You must stick with your weapons.”
Now Sui — a former Parsons pupil who launched her label in 1981 and placed on her first runway present a decade later — hopes that her Barbie will “encourage different ladies to dream what it’s they need to do with their lives.”
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Mattel
“All the things that we have talked about is de facto trusting in your individual intuition, constructing your confidence [and knowing] that you’re distinctive and there is a method that you are able to do it. Not all people’s the identical. You’ll be able to’t do it the way in which different folks do it. You must discover your individual path, and you must stick with it,” she provides.
In honor of AAPI Month, Mattel’s Barbie Dream Gap Project may also be donating to APEX for Youth, a non-profit group primarily based in New York Metropolis that empowers underserved Asian and immigrant youth from low-income households by means of neighborhood, mentorship and different sources.
