Andrew Gn Volume 46.3
COROMANDEL PRINT SATIN SILK CAFTAN with embroidered trim and ostrich feathers, 2021. Promised gift of Andrew Gn. Peabody Essex Museum. Photograph courtesy of House of Andrew Gn.
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is global in its offerings. Yes, the museum features exhibitions devoted to maritime subjects, American/New England folk art, and the infamous witch trials that took place in the 1600s, but from there the vision expands outwards to encompass a remarkable abundance of art and culture from around the world.
“Andrew Gn: Fashioning the World” exemplifies PEM’s ambitious reach. The museum pulled out all the stops to honor the fashion virtuoso who began life in Singapore and ended up holding court at his celebrated House of Andrew Gn in Paris for 28 years. Curators Petra Slinkard and Jackie Young chose examples from eighty collections and more than ten thousand “looks.” The resulting installation is dazzling and brilliant.
Gn left his homeland at age twenty-one to study fashion at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Not long after completing his studies, he accepted the French Connection Award and moved to New York City to enroll in the Design Exchange program at Parsons. Later, settled in Milan, he attended Domus Academy, where his teachers included designers Romeo Gigli, Gianfranco Ferre, and Luciano Soprani.
The young designer set up shop in Paris, which he has called “the epicenter of all things beautiful.” A mere two years after launching his fashion enterprise in 1997, he hit the big time: Barneys New York chose his first season’s collection. Alongside Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney, Gn was named “one to watch” at the time by fashion journalist Suzy Menkes. According to the PEM curators, between 1995 and 2023 he never missed a Fashion Week.
He draws inspiration for his fashion designs from a wide range of sources. For his spring/summer 2014 offering, he riffed on Peggy Guggenheim’s famous art collection, aiming to “transport the energy of [the Cubist, Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist artists’] visual language onto clothing.” Elsewhere, he borrowed Viennese artist Gustave Klimt’s golden swirls for a dress in his autumn/winter 2017 collection.
Gn’s wide-ranging influences range from 1960s “hippie” style (Vogue called it “Haute-Bohemian”) to the outfits Catherine Deneuve wore in several of her films, from Russian Constructivism to the Bloomsbury group. In each instance, he channels the aesthetics to produce clothing that aligns with the spirit of the source, which included the Italian dessert tiramisu.
BELTED PRINTED SILK DRESS in Fortuny plissé, black and white wool tweed coat with cameo ornaments trimmed with ostrich feathers, and belt in printed silk with motif in center, 2022. Promised gift of Andrew Gn. Peabody Essex Museum. Photograph courtesy of House of Andrew Gn.
The exhibition highlights some of the celebrities who have chosen Gn designs for their wardrobes. Singer Faith Hill wore one of his gowns for her performance at the UNICEF Audrey Hepburn Society Ball in Houston, Texas, in 2015. Actor Lily Collins sported a dress and coat ensemble from his 2022 Promised Land collection in the series Emily in Paris while Lady Gaga fittingly donned an ensemble featuring an outsized guipure lace collar in 2021 while promoting her film, House of Gucci.
Equally stunning is an emerald-green ensemble designed for Catherine, Princess of Wales, in 2023. According to the curators, the green references the Princess’s appointment as Colonel of the Irish Guards.
Gn depended on a team to help develop his collections, with assistants selecting fabrics that would further his design concepts. A dressmaker used his sketches to produce the toile, a cotton muslin “test” garment. The curators note how technical drawings and surface designs pinned or transferred to the toile “helped the design team visualize the final looks.” Makers in France and Italy then worked from the prototypes.
Beginning in 2007, Gn collaborated with embroiderers in Mumbai. They worked with silk and metal threads, rhinestones, beads, and other materials to create sophisticated designs.
The curators call Gn a “superb colorist,” whose use of rich and bold hues resulted in clothing that is “sensual not vulgar, feminine not dowdy, electric but not overdone.” They also note that the designer rarely wears color himself, preferring a neutral palette (one of his T-shirts is included in the show).
While Gn’s designs can be quite elaborate, “ease of wear” was top of mind. He wanted his customers to be able to “Step in, zip up and go!” He also sought to create “heritage pieces” that women could wear multiple times and pass on to the next generation.
Gn’s lifelong connections to Southeast Asia come through in some of his designs. The link began early: “When I was seven years old,” he recalled, “I was given an assignment to imagine what a Singaporean national costume would be like,” adding, “I must have used every single color in the huge box of crayons.”
Another formative event involved visiting a Shanghainese tailor named Wong with his mother. Wong made clothing out of fabrics Gn’s father collected for his wife. In retrospect, the designer realized that his first fashion tutor was Wong sifu, the Mandarin word for master or teacher.
When Gn was 15, his father gave him a complete set of the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, the illustrated 18th-century French encyclopedia of flora and fauna. He would go on to incorporate flowers, butterflies, and other natural elements in his designs.
Gn’s infatuation with coral derived from growing up near the sea and watching documentaries about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. His spring/summer 2022 collection, Corals Alive AGN, helped bring attention to reef fragility. The Great Barrier Reef Foundation used his coral-inspired designs to support its efforts to restore marine habitat impacted by climate change.
The curators note that Gn’s love of Asian art, derived from early travels and auction house and gallery visits with his family, led to his acquiring a substantial collection of Chinese porcelain and export art. They connect this passion to the museum’s own substantial holdings of Asian export art, said to be the largest in the world.
For a dress in his spring-summer 2016 Jingdezhen collection, Gn borrowed the butterflies from a Chinese porcelain bowl that is a “cherished family heirloom.” Made from an unusual assortment of materials—viscose, resin, glass beads, and tin alloy—the dress’s “vibrant, gradated colors,” in the curators’ words, “capture the essence of the glazes in use when the family’s bowl was produced.”
WHITE, MINT, AND SYNTHETIC CORAL PATCHWORK TRIPLE CREPE SLEEVELESS SHIFT DRESS with cherry blossom-inspired and Memphis-inspired appliqués, 2015. Promised gift of Andrew Gn. Peabody Essex Museum. Photograph courtesy of House of Andrew Gn.
Gn earns the description “flamboyant storyteller” with the narrative he provided for a pre-fall 2018 silk dress. “Jackie O. decides to go to Tokyo to meet the royal Imperial family of Japan,” he relates, “and makes a stopover in Kyoto.” The curators note how the custom prints for the collection bring to mind “the delicate florals of Edo period (1603–1868) kimonos and British Minton porcelain, featuring a wide range of patterns including floral posies and chinoiserie.”
Gn thought of his 2003 Pan-Asian collection as “a fashion voyage” through Singapore and Southeast Asia, celebrating a vibrant “cultural crossroads.” The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts featured a selection of looks from the collection in its China Chic festival in 2005, his designs joining those of Vera Wang, Yeohlee, Zang Toi, and Shanghai Tang.
Musical compositions played over speakers in the show underscore Gn’s cultural background. “Roots” and “Practices”, two pieces by contemporary Singaporean composer Chong Li-Chuan, add to the ambience.
Among the exhibition’s bells and whistles visitors can use a touch screen to create their own Gn-inspired ensemble. At another point in the show, they are invited to watch a clip of models on the runway while “imagining which designs to choose for your wardrobe.”
Gn continued to design during the pandemic, turning to floral motifs to create the upbeat collection May There Be Light. “Times may be grim,” the designer said at the time, “but surely, we will be celebrating again someday.”
Gn closed his Paris atelier in December 2023. As he noted in an interview related to the show, producing a new collection every three months proved an exceptional challenge and took everything to sustain over nearly three decades. “The whole point is to be exceptional,” Gn has stated, and his designs bear out this attitude. Without exception, his ensembles are head-turning creations, engaging works of fashion art.
“Andrew Gn: Fashioning the World” shows through April 5, 2026 at Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, 161 Essex Street, Salem, Massachusetts 01970. Visit their website at www.pem.org.
INSTALLATION VIEW of “Andrew Gn: Fashioning the World”. Peabody Essex Museum. Photograph by Kim Indresano.
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Carl Little reports enthusiastically, “The Peabody Essex Museum is a treasure trove.” Little spent the better part of an afternoon in November exploring its many galleries. “Where else,” he asks, “can you find a sixteen bedroom house transported from China’s Huizhou region and a show devoted to the book arts of Moby Dick under the same roof?” Not to mention the stunning retrospective of Singapore-born fashion designer Andrew Gn (pronounced Gern), which Little covers in this issue. As an arts writer and long-time resident of Maine, he covers the region with zeal, as he seeks to share Maine’s cultural wealth with the rest of the nation. Little’s most recent publications are Blanket of the Night: Poems and John Moore: Portals. He lives on Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine.
