Anna Sui launches ‘Gossip Girl’-inspired line

Anna Sui has made a career out of dressing cute party girls, so fashioning a collection using TV’s “Gossip Girl” as inspiration was hardly a stretch.

A bouncy minidress — maybe with a little leather, lace or ruffle — is the designer’s signature, but as she was putting together this line for Target, she realized that there still is a lot of room for personality in that silhouette.

Leighton Meester’s Blair was the easiest to interpret, says Sui. “It’s the way I like dressing. There’s a lot of dresses in her closet and a lot of girliness, so I related to that.”

The Blair section of the collection includes a sheer-dot black jacquard dress and another dress in metallic houndstooth jacquard with black lace trim.

The boho look of Vanessa, played by Jessica Szohr, is captured with a velvet burnout dress in a hippie floral in brown and orange. “She has more of a vintage look and mixes odd patterns,” observes Sui, who says she was a fan of the show long before this collection idea took shape.

Sui says she relates to Jenni’s (Taylor Momsen) taste in tunes. “She wants to be a fashion designer but she dresses like a punk rocker. Personally I relate to that — that’s my favorite music.”

The red, black and white Jenni wears on the show is carried through the collection in a labyrinth-print tunic and off-the-shoulder striped dress.

Blake Lively’s Serena gets the sexiest clothes, though. “Serena is so stylish in a sexy way. She likes solid color and low-cut things,” Sui says. “Her color palette is more sophisticated with darks, charcoal and some metallic accent.”

In Target stores, that translates to a black leather jacket with a satin-striped shift dress.

The overall vibe from the collection captures the cool urban lifestyle that the “Gossip Girls” live, but Sui thinks the clothes could actually be worn by a much bigger cross-section of shoppers.

“Maybe everyone won’t wear the whole outfits, but there are a lot of choices,” she says. “We wanted to make something for everyone but keep one whole spirit and use four diverse personalities to design it all.”