Guo Pei, couturier behind Rihanna's 2015 MetGala look, gets an expansive showcase in San Francisco
It was one of the great fashion moments of the internet era: For the 2015 Met gala, marking the museum’s “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibition, Rihanna electrified the red carpet in a fur-trimmed, canary yellow cape with a traffic-stopping 16-foot train. As the fashion world descended in a joyous frenzy, the designer Guo Pei found, rather instantly, a rapt Western audience. “I did not expect such a strong reaction,” Pei says now.
Though you can draw a straight line from that Yellow Empress cape to “Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy,” the retrospective opening this month at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, you won’t find it there. The new exhibition mines Pei’s career—characterized by sculptural silhouettes and painstaking craftsmanship—both before 2015 and since. Copyright © Guo Pei, Asian Couture Federation. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo: Randy Dodson.
“Our Costume program highlights extraordinary designers who have changed the course of fashion history,” says Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco , “and Guo Pei is a perfect fit: Her career is emblematic of a shift in global fashion narratives and China’s rise as a fashion leader.”
The show’s 80-plus looks, all sourced from Pei’s archives, are sometimes arranged by season or theme and sometimes coupled with Western artworks—medieval icons, chinoiserie, and examples from the Italian Baroque and French Rococo periods among them. As curator Jill D’Alessandro notes, Pei’s work resonates not only across cultures, but across media.Copyright © Guo Pei, Asian Couture Federation. Photo: Lian Xu. All rights reserved.
Take, for instance, pieces from her fall 2007 collection, “An Amazing Journey in a Childhood Dream,” which open the show. “When the ensembles first debuted, it was theater at its best—a young girl in a canopied bed above the runway dreamed, while models below acted out her dreams in pastel-colored silk confections,” D’Alessandro explains.
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