Artist of the day: Artist of the day, August 24-25: Guo Pei, a Chinese fashion designer (#780)

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Artist of the day, August 24-25: Guo Pei, a Chinese fashion designer (#780)

Guo Pei (1967) is a Chinese fashion designer. She is best known for designing dresses for Chinese celebrities, and in America for Rihanna's trailing yellow gown at the 2015 Met Ball. Guo is the second born-and-raised Asian designer to be invited to become a guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture after Lebanese designer Elie Saab. In 2016, Time Magazine listed her as one of the World's 100 Most Influential People.

Guo was born in Beijing to two members of China's Communist Party, her father being a former battalion leader of the People's Army and her mother being a kindergarten teacher. She recalls her father having thrown away her sketches and paintings as a child. She got her start in sewing at the age of 2 years old, helping her mother make clothes for the winter and developed her love for dressmaking.

Despite the otherwise oppressive fashion enforced, she still went to study and graduate from Beijing Second Light Industry School with a degree in fashion design in 1986. She found a job at one of China's first privately owned clothing brand manufacturers, Tianma. She states that there was a sudden demand for fashion that grew in China, with one of her most popular factory designs was a brightly colored winter coat with a hood. She left the company in 1997 to form her own fashion brand.

In the early 2000s Guo Pei's reputation began to grow, she received commissions to create styles for the 2008 Summer Olympics as well as the annual Spring Festival Galas put on by China Central Television (CCTV). She is responsible for Song Zuying's dress that she wore during her performance with Plácido Domingo at the 2008 Summer Olympics closing ceremony. The dress took two weeks overall to make and was covered with 200,000 Swarovski Crystals.

Her “One Thousand and Two Nights” collection debuted in November 2009, during China Fashion Week. Guo was credited as a costume designer on the set of the 2014 film The Monkey King.

In 2008, Guo conceived a canary yellow floor-length dress with a large circular train, edged with yellow coloured fur and embroidered with silver floral patterns. It took approximately 50,000 hours over two years for her design team to create and weighed about 25 kg (55 lb) on completion. Rihanna came across the piece on the internet while researching a design for the China-themed New York Met Gala in 2015. Guo Pei’s works were also exhibited at the annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, titled "China: Through the Looking Glass". In 2016, Guo Pei became a guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.

Rose Studio is the name of Guo Pei's showroom in the Chaoyang district of Beijing, and is three stories in what would be considered a drab area near in an industrial park. On the outside, it can be mistaken for a normal factory, but on the inside gold-speckled mirrors line the walls and ceilings. Guo Pei's designs are housed in displays like a museum. On the top floor, dozens of tailors, pattern cutters, shoemakers, and needlewomen work on the orders, with painstaking measures taken to make sure everything works in harmony with one another. Guo Pei employs five hundred people at three locations outside of China's capital, most learning about their craft on the job, stating that Guo Pei is a good teacher.

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