Golden girl of haute couture blazes a trail

Chinese couturier Guo Pei made international headlines when pop sensation Rihanna wore Guo's The Yellow Queen gown to the 2015 Met Gala. Weighing 25 kilograms and featuring a 4-meter-long train, the ensemble is now on display at Hong Kong's M+ museum, in an exhibition of more than 40 haute couture creations, covering the fashion designer's nearly four-decade-long career.

Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination is the Beijing-based fashion designer's first major showcase in East Asia.

Ikko Yokoyama, lead curator of Design and Architecture at M+, points o

ut that there is more to Guo's creations than merely fashion. "Her highly imaginative and cross-cultural work shares a distinctive approach and methodology with many artists and makers represented in the M+ Collections, so we wanted to create a network of visual and thematic ideas across different media, eras, and cultures while displaying her stunning haute couture garments at the center of the exhibition."

M+ Museum Director Suhanya Raffel waxes eloquent on how Guo has combined "historic craftsmanship and global inspirations to significantly build a vocabulary that is unique to popular culture today". She adds that the juxtaposition of works by Guo and artworks from the museum collections expands the scope of the exhibition and "prompts dialogues around the question of contemporary visual culture".

"Thirty-seven artists from M+ Collections are in dialogue with Guo Pei's garments in this exhibition," Yokoyama explains. "Some of them share similar approaches and concepts, such as modernizing tradition, like the works of Aisha Khalid, AD Pirous, Irene Chou, T'ang Haywen; or more direct appropriation in craft material and technique, including Isamu Noguchi and Gunjan Gupta." She adds that "the ephemerality of nature is an endless theme for many artists and makers, including Yung Ho Chang, Cao Jingping and Yoko Ono" as it is for Guo.