Exhibition showcases pioneering work of fashion designer Andrew Gn

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Andrew Gn, the pioneering Singaporean fashion designer known for his exacting eye and uncompromising craftsmanship, is the subject of a sweeping new retrospective at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us there for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen: To enter the House of Andrew Gn is to find a feast of flourishes, capes ornamented with sumptuous embroidery, gowns sculpted into singular forms that radiate a splendor of color rivaling any springtime garden.

Beauty has long been the fashion designer’s inspiration, but he can even find it in ruins.

Andrew Gn, Fashion Designer and Visual Artist: It was a collection inspired by a Venetian palazzo, but not just a normal Venetian palazzo, but a decaying Venetian palazzo which was sinking.

Jared Bowen: This is the designer taking stock of his decades in design before he closed shop in 2023. Over nearly 30 years in his Paris atelier, Gn produced 80 collections and some 10,000 ensembles. The most glam now filled galleries at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where a retrospective of his career is now on view.

Andrew Gn: Beauty is really the motto of my life, in my personal life, in my professional life. I really live for beauty.

Jared Bowen: Over his lengthy career, Gn became renowned for his demi-couture, implying the rigors of rarefied haute couture design to clothing customized for a ready-to-wear audience, and with material and craftsmanship, he says, that has always been uncompromising.

Andrew Gn: I would like to stress the fact that we design every single element on our garments. We design a textile, so be it printed, woven, embroidered, the buttons, the buckles.

Jared Bowen: Why is that important to you?

Andrew Gn: That is important because I’m a perfectionist.

Petra Slinkard, Chief Curator, Peabody Essex Museum: Because his focus is so much on the tradition, it almost makes the clothes all that much more modern.

Jared Bowen: Petra Slinkard curated the show, the first to examine Gn’s legacy, which itself is built on firsts. In 1997, he was the first Singaporean designer admitted to Paris Fashion Week, the industry’s prestigious first look at what top designers are presenting.

Petra Slinkard: He stands apart as one who has been able, I think, to introduce elements of Southeast Asia into high fashion and into global fashion.

Jared Bowen: Art and antiques fill Gn’s Paris apartment, just as they did his childhood home, which brimmed with pieces collected by his parents on world travels. It fueled the way he would ultimately define fashion, as did everything from the paintings of Monet to the vibe of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Petra Slinkard: He’s very, very visual, and throughout the exhibition we have included collages that are his own, and so you could sort of see him mapping out these visual cues that he’s sort of mashing together.

Jared Bowen: Gn’s designs have become red carpet staples for a parade of celebrities and even royalty, most notably when Princess Catherine wore one of his designs to her first Trooping the Colour ceremony as the princess of Wales.

It was a stunning moment for the designer, especially given that another royal has always been a queen of inspiration.

I understand that Queen Elizabeth was a muse of sorts to you.

Andrew Gn: A muse, yes.

(Laughter)

Andrew Gn: She’s actually quite eccentric, because no one does that sort of things anymore, a bright mustard yellow suit with matching hats. And I see that as something appropriate, but yet there’s something really edgy about it.

Jared Bowen: Not to mention a valuable lesson.

To what degree have you created drama?

(Laughter)

Andrew Gn: All the time and every day, and I think that it brings a sensation to you. You’re shocked. You are — it’s exaggerated. It brings your attention to what you have created.

Jared Bowen: But that has all wound down now. Gn closed his fashion house two years ago, leaving behind the churn of the Parisian fashion scene, where he says the pressures of launching a new collection every three months was grueling.

Andrew Gn: It’s like launching an album or a new movie.

Jared Bowen: That took its toll.

Andrew Gn: I had an open-heart surgery in 2015, and I had a stroke in 2021. And I think I was saying to myself, 30 years is enough of that fashion system and schedule.

Jared Bowen: But his intention, he says, even as the house of Gn has gone dark, was to always have his pieces live on, to be the antithesis of fast fashion so readily consumed and discarded.

Andrew Gn: My goal has always been creating really beautiful and well-crafted clothings that a woman could keep in a wardrobe for years. Eventually, she could pass it down to the next generation. And we call them heritage pieces.

Jared Bowen: That are ready to wear and of distinctly personal vintage.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Salem, Massachusetts.