By Dr. Arendse Lund, University College London

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In 2015, Rihanna sparked awe, imitation, and internet memes when she arrived at the annual Met Gala in a canary yellow gown replete with a voluptuous fur-trimmed cape embroidered with scrolls. “I was researching Chinese couture on the Internet and I found it,” Rihanna told Vanity Fair about the gown designed by Guo Pei.¹ Well known in China, Guo had designed costumes for everything from films to the 2008 Beijing Olympics; however, it was Rihanna’s Met Gala appearance that launched Guo’s profile in the West. Since then, Guo has become a familiar sight at museums across the United States, where her haute couture creations are displayed and admired. Throughout her designs, Guo weaves allusions to fantastical and historical events and places, and this provides a welcome opportunity for museums to display her creations alongside their standing collections of medieval and Baroque art. There is also no doubt that each creation is a work of art in its own right. Rihanna’s gown took 20 months to complete and the layers of embroidery, silk, and fur weighed 55 pounds. The photo of the singer ascending the red carpet ended up gracing the front cover of a special edition of Vogue. 

Guo Pei’s career exemplifies the gradual shift of stereotypes regarding the quality of Chinese design, accompanied by growing Chinese soft power fueling international interest in Asian-inspired fashion. Following the 2015 Met Gala, Guo held her first solo exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and was inaugurated as a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the chief governing body of the high-fashion industry. She was only the second born-and-raised Chinese designer awarded this honor, which allowed her to showcase her work during Paris Haute Couture Week, something she took advantage of ten times between 2016 and 2020. 

While Guo is a distinctively modern designer, historical inspirations often take center stage in her creations. As Guo told Jill D’Alessandro, the Legion of Honor curator responsible for the 2022 exhibition Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy in San Francisco, “We often say that we want to inherit the past, but there is another concept — carrying the past forward. If you were to bring the past into the future, it should not be a straight copying or inheriting process.”² Guo’s designs are rife with historical allusions while her creations provide an unbroken thread linking history to the modern day. “Legends,” her 2017 spring/summer collection, invoked dialogue between the Baroque and modern as she found inspiration in frescos and towering cathedrals. Her creations referenced European churches — particularly that of St. Gallen Cathedral in Switzerland — through bejeweled crosses, domed headdresses and gowns, and sheer motifs. 

In interviews with journalists and curators alike, Guo is upfront about invoking history and mythology through her contemporary high fashion designs. Discussing the inspiration for the Legends collection, Guo described how she walked into St. Gallen Cathedral and was immediately overcome by emotion: “I felt that my life could dissolve in that church. I sensed that I could die there…In the entire process, I only wanted to express how I felt at that moment. I will always remember that moment. It feels like life and the universe is connected as a whole.”³ Guo frequently cites emotional responses as inspiration for her collections; she is a big proponent of the idea that a work is a reflection of the artist’s feelings and soul, and her collections showcase inspiration from cultures across the world.⁴

St. Gallen was built on the site of an earlier Carolingian-era monastery; the newer, Roman Catholic church, was completed between 1758 and 1767 by the Austrian architect Peter Thumb the Elder and his namesake son, The Younger. The finished church includes the ceiling frescoes, painted by Josef Wannemacher, that mesmerized Guo and made their way into her couture designs. The frescos, framed by gilt stucco, depict the first four ecumenical councils: Nicaea (325 CE), Constantinople (381 CE), Ephesus (431 CE), and Chalcedon (451 CE), where church authorities gathered to address the nature of the human and divine. Visitors to the Baroque library are greeted by an inscription over the entrance, which declares the room the “soul’s apothecary.”⁵ 

Invigorated by her visit to St. Gallen Cathedral, Guo’s Legends collection included a cathedral-inspired dress composed of metallic paper fabric, silk gauze, crystals, gems, pearls, and beads. The nearly sheer bodice boasts a single bejeweled cross down the center and across the chest with two smaller crosses on each shoulder, and then several along the waistline before a massive golden skirt cascades to the floor. Several gowns in the collection were inspired by that St. Gallen visit; nowhere is it more obvious than on the cascading skirt of one, made of filmy fabric, where Guo devised a mural motif taken from St. Gallen’s archived drawings of its dome. 

Haute couture has been described as “a discipline of ultimate imagination, unaccountable to cost,” and the proliferation of gemstones, gold thread, as well as the elaborate embroidery decorating Guo’s collections means that her gowns are no exception.⁶ Over the course of her career, Guo has shifted away from mass fashion and towards creating these delicate and singular designs, employing a team of artisans to bring her opulent creations to life. The fabrics, gemstones, and beadwork all intricately combine in a glimmering presentation awash with allusions to the past. In search of the perfect material, Guo embarked on an 18-month collaboration with the fabric manufacturer Jakob Schlaepfer, in which she designed a series of custom-printed fabrics inspired by St. Gallen’s Baroque murals. However, there were further challenges that awaited: “I felt that the threads I normally used, the delicate method I normally adopted, couldn’t express the intense upsurge of my emotions.”⁷ Guo explained, “So I recall searching for threads everywhere. I really wanted to find one that has strength. I wanted to find a material that can arouse a very intense feeling.”⁸ She ended up stumbling upon rare, vintage gold embroidery floss at Paris’ St. Ouen market.

The attention to detail required in Guo’s creations necessitates long hours spent crafting the pieces. “Yellow Queen,” the gown Rihanna wore to the Met Gala, took around 6,000 hours to design and assemble. With a 16-foot-long train replete with three-dimensional classic pattern embroidery, and lined with fur, the weight of the gown was daunting. In 2012, when the gown initially launched as part of Guo’s “One Thousand and Two Nights” collection, a model made it halfway down the catwalk before the weight overwhelmed her. The show’s lights had to be cut so that the model could remove the cape and return backstage. Guo had designed the gown with royalty in mind; the physical weight and length of the train was to symbolize the responsibilities and challenges of a queen. “It’s a dress she has to lift, like she can lift the whole world,” Guo said of the gown.⁹ Rihanna succeeded. 

Since the 2015 Met Gala, Guo’s collections have been displayed across the United States and Europe, and the Yellow Queen is often a highlight. Museums displaying Guo’s designs rely on photos of Rihanna wearing the gown in their marketing and other promotional activities. However, in the physical exhibitions themselves, curators often choose to underscore the historical allusions in Guo’s work through their own curatorial choices and methods of display. In the 2019 exhibition Guo Pei: Couture Beyond, shown at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, St. Gallen Cathedral provided the inspiration for the backdrop for the couturier’s designs.¹⁰ The room was arranged to resemble a catwalk in a church, with mannequins frozen and draped in pieces that channeled paintings from throughout European history. Flickering lights, as if from burning torches, were scattered throughout the space. The mannequins were dressed in Guo’s creations, and the museum was dressed in the costume of religious history as a way to situate visitors in a space similar to that from the moment of Guo’s inspiration. 

Other museum curators have taken a different approach, displaying their museum’s own historical collection alongside Guo’s gowns. In 2019, for Guo Pei: Chinese Art & Couture at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, the curator paired Guo’s designs with historical objects from the museum collection. One of Guo’s pieces inspired by architecture, a silk gown from her 2012 “Legend of the Dragon” collection, includes a long train resembling the yellow tiles from an imperial palace roof; the curator positioned it alongside an 18th-century Chinese export porcelain featuring a tiled gate.¹¹ A blue-and-white gown replete with a headdress was also flanked by porcelain, further clarifying the historical inspiration for museum visitors. In 2022, for Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the curator juxtaposed Guo’s creations with the medieval European tapestries and religious iconography that lined the museum walls. Both these curators played to the strengths of their museum collections while emphasizing aspects they found significant in Guo’s designs. 

Guo’s designs invite her viewers to contemplate art and architecture from another angle — one less static but also more ephemeral, as models donning her gowns sweep down international catwalks. As Patrizia Calefato argued, “Fashion, like history, does not ‘end.’ Instead, it actively continues to create new connotations for the meaning of history and the relationship between present and past.”¹² Indeed, in 2019 as part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Fashion in Motion series, models decked out in Guo’s designs paraded through the museum’s Raphael Gallery, with the full-scale 16th-century tapestry designs on either side. Raphael created these designs after a commission by Pope Leo X for the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, and large-scale works depict the lives of Saints Peter and Paul.¹¹ The choice of backdrop created a visual dialogue, as the event emphasized the religious inspiration for the collection, and the fashion returned attention to the cultural treasures.

According to Guo, this is a type of curatorial choice that gives her pleasure: “When my works are in front of those works of art from several hundred and more years ago, what I experience is a feeling of transcendence in time and space. I think this is a kind of connection that we must make as human beings.”¹³ A proponent of blending cultures through her designs, the curatorial choices made by museum staff only serve to highlight the many interpretations and influences on her works. 

In the past decade, major museums have promoted an increasing number of couture fashion exhibitions, exploring the intersections between art, history, and fashion. The cultural hook for these exhibitions remains paramount, and Rihanna’s red carpet appearance is an undeniable draw for fashion and pop culture fans alike. Museums such as the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Bowers Museum, and the Asian Civilisations Museum all displayed the Yellow Queen in an effort to draw visitors. However, more recent exhibitions of Guo’s work, such as that at the Legion of Honor, have instead relied on the designer’s growing international fame, along with close-up photos of her opulent embroidered designs, to attract visitors on its own. With each museum that announces an exhibition of Guo Pei’s sumptuous creations, curators choose new strategies for how to display the couturier’s works, opening additional possibilities for dialogue between the historical and modern.

Dr. Arendse Lund is on the Membership Advisory Group at the Victoria & Albert Museum, UK, where she consults on membership-engagement efforts, public events, and new exhibitions. She earned her doctorate researching medieval manuscripts and the law at University College London. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Seattle Public Library. 

1. Rachel Tashjian, “The Story Behind Rihanna’s Red Carpet-Winning Met Gala Dress,” Vanity Fair, May 4, 2015, link.
2. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “A Conversation with Guo Pei,” YouTube, May 25, 2022, link.
3. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “A Conversation with Guo Pei.”
4. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “A Conversation with Guo Pei.”
5. Rolf Achilles, “Baroque Monastic Library Architecture,” The Journal of Library History (1974-1987) 11, 3 (1976): 254. 
6. Harold Koda and Richard Martin, “Haute Couture,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000; printed online October 2004), link.
7. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “A Conversation with Guo Pei.”
8. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “A Conversation with Guo Pei.”
9. Bre Graham, “Guo Pei: The Chinese designer who made Rihanna’s Omelette Dress,” The Guardian, October 18, 2017, link.
10. “Past Exhibitions: ‘Guo Pei: Couture Beyond,’” Bowers Museum, accessed February 28, 2023, link.
11. Courtney R. Fu, “Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture,” Fashion Theory 25, 1 (2001): 137-8. Patrizia Calefato, “Conclusions: Fashion as an Idea about the Future,” in Fashion as Cultural Translation: Signs, Images, Narratives, translated by Alessandro Bucci (Anthem Press, 2021), 115. 
12. Lisa Pon, “Raphael’s ‘Acts of the Apostles’ Tapestries for Leo X: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Sistine Chapel,” The Art Bulletin 97, 4 (2015): 388-408.
13.  Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “A Conversation with Guo Pei.”