“There was no fashion when I was growing up,” says Guo, looking both serious and slightly surprised. As China’s first, and most prominent, haute couture designer, Guo has gained a place of absolute prominence in China’s fashion world – and her fame has spread both nationally and abroad. Her achievement is now being celebrated at M+ with the first solo show of her most iconic designs, Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination, which includes the yellow gown that American singer Rihanna wore at the Met Gala in 2015.

 

Guo’s remark is easily understandable: as in many other fields, change in China has been extremely profound and fast, and the country has gone from a “no fashion” society where most people were wearing a military uniform inspired zhifu (zai3 fuk6 制服, a variation of the Zhongshan or Mao suit) to the current high-level of interest in new trends and styles, and a stimulating ability for local innovation.

 

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Guo was born in 1967 in Beijing. She grew up surrounded by people in standardised dresses: these were mostly homemade, as women had to clothe the whole family with the limited fabric and patterns available at the time. For those who want to dig deeper, Antonia Finnane’s fascinating 2004 book How To Make A Mao’s Suit – Clothing the People of Communist China 1949-1976 gives the perfect overview of how hard it was to follow the authorised dress code of the Mao Era, which perfectly sets the background to Guo’s young years.

 

“I started to get interested in sewing when I was two or three years old, quite naturally,” says Guo. “I was helping my mother, who was left nearly blind after an eye disease just after she gave birth to my younger brother, by threading her needles, and sitting next to her when she was sewing clothes for us children.” She explains how, in spite of China being through its least fashion-forward years, she has been interested in clothes for as long as she can remember.

 

 

She would apply what she saw her mother do to make dresses for her dolls. Eventually, her family, with a military background, was one of the first to acquire a sewing machine, and by the age of seven Guo was already learning how to use it. “But I was also extremely influenced by my grandmother, who was born in the Qing Dynasty and taught me about butterflies and flower embroideries she used to make,” she says. These were commonly seen but highly skilled embroideries that adorned anything from decorative art — especially in the south of China — to the highly symbolic rank badges worn by scholar officials with gold threads and silk. For those of the highest rank, the large badge on the chest of their tunics was a Manchurian crane, a golden-pheasant was a sign of being of the second-rank, while others sported peacocks, a wild goose, or a silver pheasant for example; there were nine ranks in total.

 

Embroidery was also very important for female clothing, both in daily dress and for special occasions, with a myriad of symbols, from Buddhism, ancient tales and the natural world, with prosperous meanings. The style had significant regional variations: the four main styles were Suzhou embroidery, Hunan embroidery, Guangzhou embroidery and Sichuan embroidery. The variations are mainly in more or less geometrical composition, colour use and type of stitches.

 

 

“It was from her tales of that variety that my fascination for this craft was sparked,” says Guo. “My grandmother also taught me a lot about more traditional culture, in terms of how people used to live, the moral values they had, or the differences in clothing between men and women before – and that too had an impact on how I dress. For example, when I saw what were the traditional colours during the imperial era, the deep pinks, the lighter greens and the turquoise blues, or the reds reserved for weddings, I was quite fascinated, and while I was telling her how beautiful they were, she also explained that wearing yellow was taboo, as it was only for the emperor.”

 

That left a mark on Guo’s imagination. “To this day, I wear no yellow clothes,” she says with a laugh – although she does design them for others. She also doesn’t wear jeans: “When China started to open up, and Western fashion became all the rage, jeans became extremely popular, so I bought a pair. When my father saw me in jeans, he was shocked and said: ‘If you wear that, you are no longer my daughter,’ so I never wore them again.” She laughs once more.

 

Guo’s more formal training, outside of what she learned at home from her mother and grandmother, was at the Beijing Industry and Trade Technician College, where she was part of the first batch of fashion graduates in 1986. There, she learned the basics of how to sketch the body and how to draw and colour clothes, but these were still the early days of China’s reopening, and fashion was still something seen as coming from abroad.

 

 

China was coming out of a time of deep isolation from the rest of the world, and everyone was all of a sudden faced with all the cultural movements, including fashion movements, that had been developing since the 1940s. It all came in at once, creating a level of dizziness and a sense of unexplored possibilities that is hard to imagine. From rock and roll to miniskirts, from abstract expressionism to permed hairs, from pizza to counterculture writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as Christian Dior and Balenciaga – everything entered the country in one go. It was exhilarating and confusing. 

 

The passage from being fascinated by her grandmother’s teachings about traditional China to being attracted by anything Western, like all her peers, is reflected in Guo’s early creations. “When I started to work as a fashion designer, just out of college, I really felt the strength of the aesthetics of Western culture,” she says. “Before starting to travel abroad, in particular to France, mostly for leisure and sometimes for work [in the late 1990s], my knowledge of Western aesthetics was quite narrow, and the more I saw, the more I fell in love with it, especially with France, French style and French fashion. Especially at the beginning of my journey as a fashion creator, I was looking for inspiration in everything that seemed really new to my eyes, which meant Western art, architecture, jewellery and clothing.”

 

 

Some of these earlier inspirations can be seen at the M+ show in the Architecture collection, and in some of the dresses in the Legends collection, a series of highly structured clothes that take direct inspiration from cathedrals, museums, and various kinds of buildings, from Gothic to Modernist, that Guo crafted in 2018, revisiting the impact of her earlier travels to Europe. This can at times result in her works being differently pigeonholed according to the viewer. “In France, they always say that my works look very Chinese,” she says, slightly puzzled, as she makes examples from her early works which actually do feature miniskirts – a complete novelty for China. “In China, they tell me I am very Westernised.”

 

It’s a reflection of Guo’s evolution and how, despite her early fascination with Western style, she eventually felt secure enough in her own taste and curiosity to once again dig into traditional Chinese aesthetics and culture. The more obviously Chinese-inspired pieces that can be seen at M+ including the one-shoulder silk sequined qipao dress from her 2019 East Palace collection, or the Qing-hua Porcelain (2009) from her 1002 Nights collection, which features a very ample and wavy gown in a fabric decorated like blue and white Chinese porcelain.

 

 

Craft, especially traditional craft — whether inspired by Chinese or European practices — remains crucial to her aesthetics. Embroidery has remained a passion to this day. “It doesn’t really matter so much to me where it originates from,” says Guo. “What I think is that craft is very important, even if it doesn’t have a specific functional purpose, but it is our heritage, and it is vital to keep it alive, and transmit traditions to future generations. Our traditional culture needs to be maintained, even when we are using it in contemporary ways. My work is very modern, even if I integrate traditional aspects into it.”

 

Her approach is open to interpretation. “Some people say that they see a Miao or a Dong inspiration in some of my work,” she notes, referring to the ethnic groups from China’s Guizhou provinces. This is particularly evident in the clothes in the Legend of the Dragon collection from 2012, also exhibited at M+. “But frankly I don’t know if it is so direct. They could be inspired from Thailand, or even from Africa. What matters the most to me is the thought behind craft and technique, and the possibility to adapt it to make things that appear beautiful to me,” she says.

 

But that beauty is vulnerable. “Craft has been disappearing,” says Guo. “Some people are a bit casual about it, they say, ‘Maybe we don’t need it anymore,’ but I disagree. It is not whether we need craft or not – it is absolutely important to preserve it. Culture needs to be protected and maintained. It is our history, it is the basis of humanism and creativity. Yes, these sound like very big words, but it is how I think. Other people are preserving music, for example. I try to do it for craft. Sometimes I think it is part of a more general loss we have caused, like the damage we have done to the natural world.”

 

 

Guo’s search for beauty can at times be in contrast with the more business-like approach necessary to sustain her creative ambitions, as her most flamboyant creations “do not really sell that well,” she says. “Especially among my Chinese clients, even at galas, they are not going to wear something too extravagant, the kind of clothes that they are willing to buy are haute couture, but still more conservative,” she explains.

 

After a long career spent travelling and absorbing influences around the world, Guo’s gaze has more recently turned inward. In 2016, she was invited to Paris for Haute Couture Week by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode and ended up doing ten seasons before deciding to stop in 2020. “I must admit that at the moment my favourite place of all is my own home,” she says. “I love to be at home and read and draw – I am not so good at languages, and I don’t really enjoy travelling so much. Actually, clothes are my language, and I think I have absorbed enough international influences for now to choose to be spending more time in China, and in Beijing in particular,” she says.

 

These days, you are most likely to find Guo in the Chinese capital. She might be discussing fabrics with her husband, Cao Bao Jie, a fabric supplier from Taiwan, or drawing and sketching her new collections, or training her staff at her atelier, where she strives to preserve manual crafts linked to all aspects of clothing, from embroidery to fine needle work, while also researching old and new Chinese aesthetics to translate them into contemporary clothes. But even now, as she looks more at her own roots, she hasn’t become insular. “I am still attracted by anything I find beautiful,” she says. “I don’t really look too much into where it comes from, but I am still learning about traditional Chinese aesthetics, and it is fascinating.”

Guo Pei  will speak at this year’s Business of Design Week which runs from December, 2024 with a special focus on the relationship between luxury and craft.

 

To see more details: https://zolimacitymag.com/chinese-designer-guo-pei-crafts-couture/

Writer: Christopher DeWolf

Photos: by May James, Courtesy Zolima CityMag

 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.