Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy at the Legion of Honor Museum

Couture Fantasy is a journey into the imaginative world of Guo Pei –  hailed as China’s first couturier and one of the most influential people shaping the global fashion industry.

Through exquisite craftsmanship, lavish embroidery, and unconventional dressmaking techniques, Guo Pei creates a fantasy that fuses the influences of China’s imperial past, decorative arts, European architecture, and the botanical world.  

Each of the Legion of Honor’s special exhibition galleries is dedicated to one or more of Guo Pei’s key runway collections.

An Amazing Journey in a Childhood Dream (2008) was created when Guo was pregnant with her second child. For this collection, she envisioned her daughter’s dolls coming to life. These playful designs reveal an overlay of influences that define Guo’s artistic vision. The tightly pleated dresses, made from origami-like folds, reference Guo’s own childhood and the toys she made and played with during the Cultural Revolution. The pastel color palette derives from eighteenth-century French drawings, and the separates embroidered with raised metallic thread were inspired by matador costumes worn by Spanish bullfighters. 

 

„For Guo Pei, each collection starts with a philosophical idea—a spark of inspiration—drawn from a wide range of sources from her personal life and travels, as well as art and architecture, literature, and nature. Layers of meaning and imagery form a bricolage of opulent surfaces imposed upon sculptural silhouettes,” explains Jill D’Alessandro, Curator in Charge of Costume and Textile Arts.“

The next gallery focuses on the botanical world through two collections: Garden of Soul (2015) and Elysium (2018). Guo Pei cites the Chinese saying “There is a kingdom in a flower; wisdom in a leaf” as the inspiration for Garden of Soul. She further explains, “I always find the power of nature fascinating, especially when the flowers are blossoming,” and she draws comparisons between the human soul and gardens and their mutual need to be nurtured.

In Elysium, Guo Pei continued to explore botanical life, looking not to the flower petals but the root structures. The designer employed skilled bamboo-basket weavers to create the voluminous silhouettes with intricate embroidered detailing that form part of this collection. 

“Roots are the source of life and vitality; without roots, there’s no life”. 

The following gallery is dedicated to the skilled artisans who work in Guo Pei’s atelier. Visitors will get a unique insight into the designer’s adaptation of traditional techniques and the time-consuming craft of creating couture in a display of “long pau,” or “dragon robes,” juxtaposed with three ensembles from Guo Pei’s Legend of the Dragon collection (2012), current works in progress, and a video of Guo Pei’s atelier.

„For me, the purpose of creating works is to share them, with the hope that people from different cultural backgrounds will come together in the exchange and spread of culture.“ Guo Pay

Exhibiting in Paris and traveling in Europe have had a profound impact on Guo Pei’s work. The next gallery presents Guo Pei’s exploration of architectural elements in two collections called Legends and L’Architecture. Guo Pei’s second couture collection presented in Paris, Legends (Spring 2017), was inspired by a visit to the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. For this collection, she commissioned a fabric woven of gold metal fiber and silk thread, printed with images from the cathedral’s arched domes.

Guo Pei staged her runway presentation for L’Architecture (Fall/Winter 2018–2019 Paris Haute Couture Week), at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. The museum’s extensive collections of Romanesque, Gothic, and Neoclassical molds served as the inspiration for the collection. In Guo Pei’s hands, flying buttresses were translated into wide panniers of translucent silk with a stated intention to evoke architecture’s “beauty of strength” and foster “a dialogue between the human body and spatial dimension.” 

The penultimate gallery presents Guo Pei’s most recent collection, Himalaya (Spring/Summer 2020 Haute Couture). In its creation, Guo Pei was drawn to the Himalaya mountain range — as a holy place, the residence of the gods, and a sacred temple of the soul and other Asian cultures. She used her personal collection of rare obi belts from Japan, which she and her team transformed by turning them inside out and reassembling them to show the time and labor of the skilled weavers who created these exquisite textiles. Guo Pei states, “Haute couture is not made for commercial gain, but more for a kind of inner quest, a satisfaction of our spiritual being.”

The fantastical collection Alternate Universe (2019–2020) serves as the exhibition finale. Inspired by the ideas of an afterlife and reincarnation, Guo Pei expresses:

„Since death is inevitable, I prefer to imagine it as a dream, an alternate universe parallel to this world, where everything returns to its original state of true pureness and beauty. It is the start of a mysterious journey.“

The ensembles presented symbolize light and darkness coexisting, angels and demons next to one another, and magical creatures creeping out of the shadows. Her signature three-dimensional embroidery techniques conjure up animal and insect motifs, from the monkeys of Aesop’s Fables to the snake that lured Eve to steal the forbidden fruit.

Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy at the Legion of Honor Museum Part Two is coming soon…

Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco with significant support from the Asian Couture Federation. The exhibition is at the Legion of Honor Museum until 5 September 2022.