Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy at the Legion of Honor Museum
Guo Pei
Couture Fantasy
April 16, 2022 — September 5, 2022
Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy celebrates the extraordinary designs of Guo Pei—hailed as China’s premier couturier—and includes more than 80 works from the past two decades, highlighting her most important collections shown on Beijing and Paris runways. Through exquisite craftsmanship, lavish embroidery, and unconventional dressmaking techniques, Guo Pei fuses the influences of China’s imperial past, export art, European architecture, and the botanical world. The exhibition reveals the trajectory of Guo Pei’s career as remarkable yet emblematic of China’s emergence as a leader in the fashion world in the early twenty-first century.
The Legion’s galleries are interspersed with Guo Pei’s designs, exploring various themes in placements that highlight the sculptural nature as well as historical and iconographical references of Guo Pei’s work. The juxtaposition with European painting and decorative arts— in particular, Chinese export art—offers a metaphor for our intercontinental world, which is so perfectly captured in her designs.
Couture Fantasy invites visitors on a journey into Guo Pei’s creative universe with designs displayed throughout the permanent collection and special exhibition galleries at the Legion of Honor, transforming the museum into a palace of couture.
Each of the Legion of Honor’s special exhibition galleries is dedicated to one or more of Guo Pei's key runway collections.
The opening gallery, Rosekrans Court, provides a dramatic backdrop for an exploration of the interplay between theater and costume design in Chinese fashion. Shown on the runway as a play, 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.
Floral motifs, associated with traditional notions of femininity, have a long history in Chinese decorative arts and textiles and appear frequently in Guo Pei’s designs. 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. “Roots are the source of life and vitality; without roots, there’s no life,” she explains. The designer employed skilled bamboo-basket weavers to create the voluminous silhouettes with intricate embroidered detailing that form part of this collection.
The following gallery is dedicated to the skilled artisans who work in Guo Pei’s atelier. Visitors will get 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.
Exhibiting in Paris and traveling in Europe has had a profound impact on Guo Pei’s work. The next gallery presents Guo Pei’s exploration of architectural elements in two collections called Legend and L’Architecture. Guo Pei’s second couture collection presented in Paris, Legend (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.”
China’s imperial past and the country’s vast cultural history was the focus for the collection East Palace (2019). For this runway show, presented at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Guo Pei created a rendition of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City. Inspired by Qing Dynasty court dress, Guo presented an overview of traditional Chinese dress and Chinese design elements, with elaborate three dimensional pale gold embroidery of imperial dragons, birds, and flowers.
The penultimate gallery will present 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 that, “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.
Permanent Collection Galleries
The museum’s collections of European painting and decorative arts are presented in a suite of galleries designed in the neoclassical style on the Legion of Honor’s main floor. As a metaphor for the intercontinental world in which we live, opulent and intricate designs by Guo Pei are displayed in these galleries. The dialogues created highlight the sculptural nature, and the historical and iconographical references made by the designer in her creations.
Examples include the “Phoenix” gown from the designer’s Legend of the Dragon collection (2012), presented as the guest of honor in the museum’s popular grand gilded historical French reception room, the “Salon Doré.
The majestic gold-embroidered “Da Jin” (“Magnificent Gold”) ensemble from the Samsara (Lifecycle) collection (2006) takes center stage among works of French and Italian Baroque and Rococo art. Gowns from the Legends collection, inspired by the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland, are situated among the saint icons and Madonna figures that populate the medieval gallery. Several pieces from the Encounter and Courtyard collections (both 2016) are interspersed in the French and British painting and Decorative Arts galleries, highlighting the transcultural resonance of Guo Pei’s designs.
A gallery is dedicated to a special presentation that juxtaposes objects from the Museums’ collections of Chinese export art and European chinoiserie—including a tapestry, vases, and a tea set—with Guo Pei’s “Porcelain” dress from the One Thousand and Two Nights (2010) collection.
Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy is curated by Jill D’Alessandro, Curator in Charge of Costume and Textile Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in close collaboration with Guo Pei. BuYun Chen, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Swarthmore College, and currently fellow at Stanford Humanities Center, and Rachel Silberstein, Lecturer in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington serve as advising scholars to the exhibition.
Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco with significant support from the Asian Couture Federation.
Introducing Guo Pei
Guo Pei is China’s most renowned couturier. For over 20 years, she has been dressing celebrities, distinguished ladies, royalty and political elite who turn to her for show-stopping, magnificent creations when they want to look beautiful and stand out from the crowd.
A modern messenger of her cultural heritage, Guo Pei has breathed new life into embroidery and painting traditions that date back thousands of years. Showcasing the finest of traditional Chinese craftsmanship while incorporating contemporary innovation and Western style, Guo Pei is a passionate artisan who wants to evoke people’s emotions and inspire people through her art.
In the world of Guo Pei, fabric, shape and texture resonate with meaning. Inspired by fairy tales, legends and even military history, every creation tells a story and is a canvas for artistic expression, bringing beauty, romance and the designer’s imagination to life. They tell the stories which paintings and embroidery have conveyed throughout the centuries.