BY MARLOWE BJORKLUND

I was told we were going to the museum. I was told it was going to be a fashion exhibit. I was told my best friend was to be joining us. I was told we were getting a private tour from our friend who is a docent at the Palace of Legion of Honour. I was told the collection on display was the work of the legendary Guo Pei. I was told that I died for thirty seconds, but would you believe me if I told you that my corpse was smiling?

Well neither would I. All the rest of it was true, through. We went to the museum. We had a tour. My best friend was there. It was a display of Guo Pei. It was stunning.

The previous fashion exhibit I had been to at one of our local museums was a Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit showing off a number of his mermaid couture pieces. That was a spiritual experience, and this one set the bar for fashion exhibit’s even higher than it was before.

You might think you don’t know Guo Pei, and you might be correct in that. However, if you know the Met Gala, you also might be wrong. Isn’t it fun to be wrong? Now the piece I think you might recognise was a meme for a quick smidge. It was a dress worn by BadGaLlRiri herself. It was 2015. Before the Trump Presidency, TikTok, and the looming horizon of university applications were real. The theme was “China: Through the Looking Glass” and it was stunning. The one name I took away from it was Guo Pei.

I was living in Paris, and had long loved fashion. The copious coffee table books of Paris, Vogue, Prada, Chanel, Tom Ford, Fashion Through the Ages, Style, and the like were emblematic of my mother. My mother wanted, and probably still wants, for me to be a leading executive at Neiman Marcus. Largely so I can get her whatever clothes she wants. Honestly? I’d go for the gig for the same reason. The Met Gala was something I did not care for, but I had recently downloaded Snapchat and I clicked on a DailyMail article about the Best and Worst dressed list. I discovered Guo Pei, and I still am recovering from the fact that I will probably never get to own one of her pieces.

Guo Pei, for those who don’t know, is a world renowned coutier. Couture is not just designer. Couture is like Champagne. There are rules. Haute Couture is built of a federation of around one hundred members. You need to be an approved fashion house, it’s not just a concept, it’s an earned title. It is the highest art form of fashion. It’s not the Pret-A-Porter we wear on our quotidian basis, it’s not even the fancy dress you wore once for a wedding, oh no. It’s the months long waiting list for a Giambattista Valli with over 240 hours and 6,000 meters of fabric geared towards a target audienf of the 0.001% (Vogue). Since 1945 it is a legally protected term that is an awarded and potentially rescindable title granted to major fashion houses from the Ministry of Industry. Members must create custom pieces in an atelier with a minimum of 15 full time staff and 20 full-time techinical workers in one of their ateliers. They must have a minimum of 50 unique designs spanning day to night pieces presetned in January and July. It is the cutting edge. It is the leaders of industry. It is the side of fashion that fashionistas are not invited to partake in. It is the highest degree of fashion, and to me, it is embodied by Guo Pei.

Making her debut in January of 2016, Pei’s artistry begins with her birth in 1967. At age two she began to sew, got into dressmaking, and by 1986 had graduated at the top of her class from Beijing School of Industrial Fashion Deisgn. The point at which she was launched into the limelight as a global phenomena? That same 2015 dress that first introduced me to her. In the year following that dress she held a solo exhibit at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and in 2016 was invited to become a member of Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (one of the three Chambres of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the other houses being Men’s Ware and Women’s Ware).

Pei’s work is — to me — the embodiment of couture. It is art. It is not truly meant to be worn. It is meant to provoke, it meant to inspire, it is meant to intrigue, it is not meant to seen on Market Street on a Thursday. It is not even meant to be seen in the rows of attendees at a major fashion event. It is meant for a museum. Looking at some her collections, they display the fundamental value of couture: craftsmanship. She is not only a creative, she and her studio are artisians.

Despite the fact that couture is ultimately geared towards the peak clientele, to me it is also not meant to be worn. Couture is art, and while you should dress in an artful way, and embody the ideas of art, turning a Monet or a Van Gogh into a bag does not transfer the value inherent to the art to the piece of clothing. Despite Louis Vuitton’s attempts. Guo Pei goes beyond the idea of clothes as objects whose purpose is practical. While one might argue a Gucci shirt, or a Celine skirt is an impractical article of clothing given the price point, at a fundemental level they are not intriscially different from a Primark piece. They are both meant to be worn and used as clothing, to protect you from the elements, to cover your body, and to express something about you as a person. Pei’s clothing transcends this. Her clothing is beyond the realm of clothes.

Looking to the above image, it is evident that her goal is not clothing for a weekly rotation of fabulous fits. She is looking into the absurd, she is creating art, and while many an artist’s chosen medium is oil paint, or sometimes a water color, her chosen medium is fabric, beads, and the ferver of creativity embroided into her history.

Her creations look ancient Chinese history, to childlike wonder and dreams, to architectural principals, to alternate universes, to womanhood. She pours the intersectionality of her interests and experience into fabric and the products are amazing.

A quote from an article written about the Pei exhibit I saw in San Francisco puts it wonderfully:

When you look at her work, you see myriad influences from her early childhood—from learning to sew at an early age, attending the theater with her family, her grandmother’s stories about beautiful, embroidered butterflies on clothing, to making her own toys out of origami and taking walks in Ritan Park, where she developed a love of both nature and architecture. (Juxtapoz - Source).

Guo Pei shows the finery of fashion as art, and inspires those who view her work to incorporate unique artisitc visions into their own wardrobes. Multicultural, historical, she creates “work that fuses the influences of China’s imperial past, decorative arts, European architecture and the botanical world” (Forbes). Guo Pei upholds the mantle of couture as the purest form of fashion as a means for artistic creation. She is a philosopher of fabric. She a name to remember. She is revolution the art of not just Chinese fashion — but the very essence of couture. She is an artist for the history books.

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