I am quickly falling in love with Guo Pei, and I hope by the end of this, you will be too. I touched briefly on this collection in this post, but it really deserves more coverage than that. So join me in a deep dive into why her show was ahhh-maz-ing.
If you want a quick intro to who she is and what she does, I super recommend this 2-minute video:
Guo Pei operates her own ready-to-wear brand in China, Rose Studios (I could not for the life of me find their website, apologies), which outfits celebrities and other fancy folks for events and appearances. However, her couture line is her passion project.
You see, ready-to-wear lines, generally speaking, need to be wearable. Designers have a bottom line to meet, so it follows that they need to produce marketable clothing that people can actually wear in their day-to-day.
Storytelling
Couture is another story – in fact, for Guo Pei, it’s all about the story. A garment can be more sculptural than wearable, and that’s just fine, as long as it tells a story.
Guo Pei’s storytelling in this collection is a monster of a task to interpret, one that I, as someone deeply steeped in Western culture, am woefully unqualified to tackle. But man did I try, because one good look at these pieces is enough to tell you that there is SOMETHING happening here that is worth checking out. If you are familiar with Chinese culture and traditional symbols, please share!
There is a lot to unpack here. Her embroidery is so thick with symbolism that I truly believe someone could write a wonderful thesis on this collection alone.
So I’m limiting myself, due not only to lack of time and space, but also to lack of expertise. I searched for interviews with her about this collection specifically, and didn’t find anything. I’ll update you if that changes.
Here’s a video of her whole show:
And a video of some of the pieces up-close from the IG account Couture Notebook:
On the Afterlife
She described her collection as representing an alternate universe and indicated, according to Vogue, that the collection *may* have alluded to the afterlife.
It’s worth noting that a few critics have interpreted this collection through a Western lens, which isn’t to say that’s wrong (even if overrepresented). We all bring our own experience. But for me, I’d like to try and see where Pei herself was coming from. She is very vocal about her deliberate use of traditional Chinese imagery and design, especially in her couture collections. I think it’s likely that she has merged some European-inspired imagery with a larger portion of traditional Chinese imagery, so I’ll do my best to interpret her work as a mix weighted towards Chinese symbolism.
The Twins
She opened the show with twins sharing a double-bodiced, single-skirted gown that is so laden with embroidered images that it’s hard to know where to start looking. So let’s start with the obvious: they’re twins, and at the root of it, they’re wearing a black dress with cream accents.
Creating a twin-dress like this is not a decision you just stumble upon. I can’t imagine making this dress was easy. No, this feels like a deliberate decision, and with a designer like Pei who is so married to symbols and meaning, it’s hard to imagine such an opening as being arbitrary. This piece is at the very least introducing us to the idea of duality, the coexistence of life and afterlife, earthly and divine, etc. It prepares the onlookers to think in terms of twos, of contrast, or of two alternating realities.
A Note on Color
Black in Chinese culture is the color of the Heavens, and white is the color of death. In the opening twin dress, there’s a merger here of the two. It’s by far the “blackest” of all the looks – from here on out, with the exception of the finale, we see mostly cream with a few black and light blue accents. So we start at the point of the Heavens, of the divine, with black – and then move into white. We’re transformed into a plane beyond life, beyond even the heavens, but no less divine.
Symbols
At this point in the show, the conclusion that we’re in a hyper-divine sort of afterlife – as opposed to some sort of blanched inferno – is based the combination of color and symbols. You see, even if we’re in a post-death realm, the embroidery’s positive messaging assures us that we’re more than ok. Let’s break it down a bit.
One of the most-repeated and accented images is that of the monkey, which let me on a deep-dive into the internet on symbology. This monkey is likely a gibbon, which in the Zhou Dynasty represented a “symbol of the world of the supernatural, mysterious, and remote from men’s daily life,” according to this 1967 essay.
There are numerous elephants (many ridden by gibbons), which represent wisdom and strength; pearls are everywhere, symbolizing perfection and enlightenment, and azure dragons adorn hems, signifying benevolence, wealth, and justice. If you’re in the afterlife, you surely have very good company.
And then, slowly, there’s a change as things start to feel more earthly. It starts with some branches …
… and (d)evolves into sparkling critters …
… Until the finale piece. Then it is full blown LIFE.
The Finale
Somehow, after pouring over this show, tracking the evolution each new look represents, and generally obsessing over it, I can’t help but feel that this finale dress is really a giant question mark. That sudden, consolidated outpouring of color is nothing short of arresting.
In most of the collection, we’re in that calm realm of cream and white, thinking that nothing could be more beautiful or sacred than that world. Then we’re smacked in the face with rich orange, yellow, and green, all at once. These colors are all about joy, prosperity, and health. It makes me wonder if I were going about divinity all wrong; that all of those dreamy white looks were just a prequel for The Real Thing. “The Real Thing” being something loud, jubilant, less restrained, less cerebral.
Which leads me to ask, is there nothing more divine than living?
That’s why this collection touched me so much. I love those big, intense questions that art like this throw at us. It adds so much joy and wonder to the experience, making it so much more than an exercise of categorizing clothing into “pretty” and “ugly” categories.
How do you interpret this season? Let me know!
love,
Stig
