Guo Pei Exhibition

 Last week I flew from Dunedin to Auckland to visit the Guo Pei Exhibition being held at the Auckland Art Gallery. December 2023 - May 2024

The gallery has on display 60 of Guo Pei's dresses. I was introduced to her a few years ago by a friend who shares a mutual interest in all things textile. Before I went I did some more homework on Guo Pei. I looked through a book I already own from an earlier exhibition, watched a film about her Yellow Is Forbidden and listened to a few interviews with her. I also booked myself on the guided tour of the exhibition which was for an hour.

 

Guo Pei is a Chinese fashion designer who lives in Beijing. She started as a fashion designer after the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Through her life she has worked as a designer for others, independently to sell to the mass market, then more exclusively to clients and finally she worked to be included in the Haute Couture fashion industry of France. Currently she is designing to display in museums.

The dresses in this exhibition were from different shows she has designed.

This exhibition for me was a "must see" due to her extensive use of hand embroidery to create detail, movement and the overall effect in her work. She dresses her models in all aspects, a look might include the dress, shoes, jewellery, hair (wig) and head dress or other item she feels completes her vision.

 

She achieves this through a staff of 500. Three hundred of those are hand embroiderers and another two hundred include the pattern cutters, seamstresses etc with only a few being in administrative roles.

I was absolutely entranced by my time in her exhibition and spent two days viewing the collection picking up different things each time I viewed them, there is so much detail.

There is an excellent and large exhibition book which I bought and I also took loads of my own close up photos. 

If you get to the gallery but don't have the time or funds to attend the full exhibition 5 of her dresses are in a lower gallery free to visit. They look amazing amongst the beautiful architecture and paintings.