Her brother Eddy spends a lot of time at the Sunset Boulevard store. Her father helps negotiate contracts and terms. But only when Sui returns to New York, does she feel truly at home. "I like the energy, the pace of New York, and you can walk everywhere."

Retail excites Sui, especially, she says, when a famous personality visits. The downside is having to deal with people trying to sell their services. Over 200 accounts have carried her designs over the past 20 years. It's a testament to Sui's rare degree of strength and resilience.

Anna Sui was born in Dearborn, Michigan on August 4 of a year she flatly refuses to reveal. She was the second of three children. Her father Paul was a structural engineer. Her mother Grace was a homemaker. They had married in Paris where Grace was studying art. Anna's older brother was born there. As the family's only girl Anna might have been expected to get all the attention. "Did you ever live in a Chinese family?" Sui retorts, her tone brimming over with Joy Luck Club-esque ethnic portent. But Anna idolized her brothers, tagging along and aggreeably playing boys' games. The only feminine aspects of Sui's girlhood seems to have been playing with Barbie dolls and being obsessed with the color lavender.

It was an idyllic childhood. Sui goes as far as to place it into the Leave It to Beaver class. She was a good student, particularly enjoying history classes. Dinner was served at the same time every night. She was voted the best dressed in the ninth grade. Sui's first date wasn't until the junior prom. Her older borther was the smartest kid in school, and theirs was the only Asian family, which made her more of a novelty than the object of racial hostility.

As a teenager Sui clipped pages from fashion magazine and archived them in what she now calls her "Genius Files". She has turned to them for inspiration throughout her career.

Sui sewed many of her own clothes and even appliqued shoes with leftover swatches of fabric from her old desses. She developed a passion for rock music and rummaging through second-hand stores to find 40s dresses, platform shoes and old feather boas. Her color of choice turned purple during her teen years until she discovered black in her senior year. Her first boyfriend was a member of a rock band.

An indelible impressions was left in Sui's adolescent mind by a story in Life. It was about two young women who, after attending Parsons School of Design in New York, established themselves as fashion designers and opened a boutique in Paris with the help of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. What Sui didn't know was that Irving Penn happened to be the stepfather of one of those women.

"As a kid," she reflects, "you don't realize the connections [that make things happen]." All she had to do was go to Parsons, thought Sui, and the rest would fall into place. She promptly announced her plans to become a fashion designer. "Why do you want to design dresses," asked her distraught Mom, "when you have brains?"

Nothing was going to stop Sui as she packed her bags to go to New York on scholarship to attend the Parsons School of Design. Once her parents determined that their daughter was serious ambition, they became supportive and financed her college expenses.

After a couple of months of dorm life, Sui moved out into a small apartment with two roommates. That kicked off the wild years that preceeded adulthood. Having a good time through endless parties and experimentation with sex and drugs became Sui's new life mission. The sex was wilder then than could be imagined by today's young. "You are the product of your time," says Sui, "and [the early] 70's was a very permissive era." Soon, Sui's apartment became known as Clubhouse Central. People made a routine of meeting at her place each evening before venturing out. They partied, dressed up, took pictures. Many of Sui's friends from those days have been lost to drugs. "I never liked getting high," says Sui, "I've seen too many lives [being] destroyed.

"I'm totally against drugs now," she says, though she believes doing drugs is entirely a personal decision which society should respect.

At Parsons in 1973 Sui met Steven Meisel, then a student of fashion illustration. They became fast friends.