There are gowns that on top resemble what Marie Antoinette might wear to go bullfighting, but with tiered and layered silk miniskirts that give off a kind of flapper/1960s go-go dancer silhouette.
Guo Pei’s porcelain dress from her 1002 Nights collection, 2010. The Legion of Honor is hosting a lavish retrospective of the couture designer Guo Pei — more than 75 pieces selected from the runways of Paris and Beijing over the past two decades. The work is otherworldly and dazzling — each piece represents literally thousands of hours of painstaking, expert sartorial artistry.
In 2016, she became the second Chinese-born-and-educated designer to be inducted into the French fashion industry’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture; that year, she also was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. When Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took over as paramount leader of China in 1978, Pei was given the opportunity to apply to university and was accepted into a government fashion program.
Her Rose Studio now employs nearly 500 people, capable of the kind of traditional needlework and other forms of tailoring wizardry and expertise usually reserved for the papacy or royal weddings. To walk through her couture collections is to gasp at impossibly opulent, magnificent feats of time and expert detail work; there are miles of brocade and golden thread splashed over collars and neckpieces, bodices and giant trains — veritable, wearable Faberge eggs. Well, theoretically wearable: “I use the weight of the clothes, the height of the shoes, and the unwieldiness of the dress to represent the inner strength and confidence of a woman,” reads a Pei quote on one of the museum walls.
In the L’Architecture collection — from Pei’s fall/winter 2018 runway collection at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris — there are midi-length gowns encrusted with beadwork detailing Gothic churches, and dresses built from translucent panels, embroidered with street scenes.
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