Profile: Sue Wong. Fashion Institution.

At the opening night of this fall's Fashion Week L.A., Sue Wong premiered her new 2016 'Alchemy and Masquerade' fashion line, an impressive display of 79 new gowns with requisite headpieces. So extensive was the hand worked materials and range of designs that it could have been a tour de force for any inventor. But one comes to realize that all this work and artistry is merely just another normal show for Sue Wong. She does them twice a year with her signature style of haute glamour that continues to impress and set a high bar for the industry. The fact the many celebrities are drawn to her work doesn't hurt either.

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Sue Wong has positioned herself in the world of fashion in a way many designers would admire and envy. Called by some an institution, she has offices and show rooms in New York and Los Angeles, and her clothing lines are sold at the finest retailers and boutiques throughout the U.S. and available in 25 countries. Receiving an award from the California State Assembly the night of her show, recognizing her excellence in fashion across the world, one of many career awards, she said "I'm getting so many awards lately you'd think my career is winding down, but I'm happy to announce it's just revving up!"

Watching her models walk the runway that night, I was taken with how her designs balance that fine line between 'wearable' and 'couture'. Fashion, of course, is also theater. Buyers, reviewers and celebrities are attracted to the glamour, the outlandish and the dramatic. When creations are walked by that look like they would be more at home draped on a Game of Thrones warrior queen it's thrilling. But if you can't wear any of it the next day, that's going to hurt any fashion company's bottom line. What's fascinating about Sue Wong's work is how wearable so much of the theatrical beauty she puts on the runway is. There's no question that what she does, she does somehow differently than her peers.

An invitation to her after-party that same night brought me late to her downtown studio, the entire second floor of which was once an industrial building in downtown L.A. on the east side of Koreatown. Redesigned as a high ceilinged, big windowed flow through space, with many work stations and show rooms, it was now packed with 300 of her closest friends and admirers.

But what could easily have been a glad handing self congratulatory get together with enthusiasts and colleagues was something altogether different. Wong had numerous artistic friends perform that evening, showing off their own talents while she sang their praises. Opera star Michael Peer sang "Music of the Night" from Phantom of the Opera a capella (which he had sung earlier that evening at the close of her fashion show), Djordje Stijepovic a basist with several albums to his credit played several solos, Medi EM played an inspired flamenco guitar, and Katja Rieckermann, who has been Rod Stewart's lead saxophonist, peeled a phenomenal series of songs. It was a salon, right out of the kind you read about in Paris in the early 1900s, where artists gather to share their talents, and in the midst of it all Sue Wong was asking them each to play one more encore so that it was more about them, and not her. Once again one notices that Sue Wong does things differently.

Beauty is my reason for being here I feel I was put on this earth for a certain purpose and that divine purpose of the artist is to create beauty," she says to me as we sit in her studio a week later on a quieter day. Having just finished three fashion events back to back, the Emmy's, and NY and LA fashion week as well as a 400 guest birthday party for visiting royalty at her home, she was professing exhaustion. "I'm ready for a vacation!" she says laughing, while still making sure visiting friends got the dresses they needed to borrow for an upcoming event and having her picture taken with a TV actor who's come visiting as well. Just another day for Sue Wong.

She sits at her spacious desk in her large modern office with an Andy Warhol Mao on the wall behind her. "I always wanted to have a Warhol. It's ironic that I fled Mao in China with my mother, and here he is behind me on my wall."

There is a bit of magic to Sue Wong, and she imbues it in her work and in her life, merely because of her deep convictions. "I believe I'm on a life mission, and it's to put some beauty into the world," she says.

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