Mattel Honors Fashion Designer Anna Sui With Her Own Barbie Doll for AAPI Heritage Month (Exclusive)

• Mattel is celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a new Barbie doll of Chinese fashion designer Anna Sui

• The doll is featured in the Inspiring Women Series, which has previously honored Kristi Yamaguchi and Anna May Wong

• Sui tells PEOPLE how her Barbie came together from the outfit to the glam

Anna Sui designs for the runway, for the stars and, yes, even for Barbie dolls.

In 2006, the Chinese-American fashion icon collaborated with Mattel on the Boho Barbie, a figurine that encapsulated Sui’s signature bohemian aesthetic, but not the woman behind the seams. Now, almost 20 years later, that is all changing.

Today, Sui, 60, is the face of her very own Barbie figurine featured in Mattel’s Inspiring Women Series and the moment comes just in time for Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month (May 1-May 31). It’s an opportunity that she tells PEOPLE she “never dreamed would happen.”

Sui immersed herself in the process of creating her own doll and had “a lot of fun” doing it. “It was such an amazing moment when they said, you can choose what body type you want, your skin tone, your hair type. All those things were in the selection of how we were developing,” she says.

Related: Kristi Yamaguchi’s Barbie Celebrating 1992 Olympics Gold Medal Moment Even Includes Her ‘Big Hair’ (Exclusive)

What she and the team also approached with precision was creating an outfit for mini Anna Sui. The doll comes glammed up in a grunge-forward starburst dress paying homage to one of Sui’s 2007 collections, is decked out in accessories inspired by her personal treasures and Spring 2025 designs and carries a miniature version of the Anna Sui Classic Eau de Toilette fragrance.

Sui’s signature glam — her bangs, her red lip, her black eyeliner (which she loves so much she does her eyes up before she hits the gym) and a colorful nail polish — come together to reflect the designer to the fullest. “This is me and this is how I feel the most comfortable. I think that having that recognition of a look is really important. You kind of, I don’t know, become a caricature of yourself,” explains Sui.

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From head to toe, Sui’s Barbie tells a story of perseverance. Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit as a child of Chinese immigrants, she wasn’t surrounded by peers who looked like her. But, she says, “I think the fact that I was unique, I liked that. And so I pursued that and my style became much more exaggerated even once I moved to New York and started experimenting with looks and makeup and clothes…I liked the attention. I wanted to stand out.” A motto she always stuck by: “You have to stick with your guns.”

Now Sui — a former Parsons student who launched her label in 1981 and put on her first runway show a decade later — hopes that her Barbie will “inspire other women to dream what it is they want to do with their lives.”

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Related: Barbie Celebrates AAPI Heritage Month with Doll of Late Chinese-American Hollywood Icon Anna May Wong

“Everything that we’ve talked about is really trusting in your own instinct, building your confidence [and knowing] that you are unique and there’s a way that you can do it. Not everybody’s the same. You can’t do it the way other people do it. You have to find your own path, and you have to stick with it,” she adds.

In honor of AAPI Month, Mattel’s Barbie Dream Gap Project will also be donating to APEX for Youth, a non-profit organization based in New York City that empowers underserved Asian and immigrant youth from low-income families through community, mentorship and other resources.

Read the original article on People