Fashion designer Anna Sui has spoken about the psychedelic posters that shaped her visual world, as a new Detroit exhibition draws on her long-held fascination with the disposable art of the rock-poster era. In an Artnet interview published on 27 October, Sui describes a collection built not from auction rooms but from walls, where posters were pinned up with thumbtacks or tape, enjoyed for a season and then discarded.

At the centre of her affection is the work of Gary Grimshaw, whose kaleidoscopic posters advertised shows at Detroit's Grande Ballroom. Sui says her collection of Grimshaw's work is now fairly complete, spanning not only his designs but other posters from the venue's heyday. What once counted as ephemera, printed to promote a night's music and then thrown away, has become for her a body of collectible art, valued precisely because it was never meant to last.

The interview belongs to Artnet's Art We Love series, which asks well-known figures from the art world and beyond to discuss a work or body of work that lifts them. Sui's answer reaches beyond a single image toward an entire visual culture: bold lettering, swirling colour and imagery made to be seen from across a room, then lived with at close quarters on a bedroom wall. Her account treats the posters as both design objects and personal memory, tied to a time when music venues were also galleries for a generation of young audiences.

The Detroit show, titled The World of Anna Sui, gives that private enthusiasm a public frame. Presenting the posters in an exhibition setting invites visitors to see them as Sui sees them: not as background decoration for concerts, but as works with their own inventiveness, humour and craft.

Sui's collection is a record of that stubborn affection, and the Detroit exhibition turns it into an argument that the art people live with, even briefly, can matter as much as the art that hangs in museums.