The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will celebrate Guo Pei’s extraordinary designs through Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy, a major comprehensive exhibition of her groundbreaking work, running April 15-Sep 5, 2022.

Through exquisite craftsmanship, lavish embroidery, and unconventional dressmaking techniques, designer Guo Pei creates a couture fantasy that fuses the influences of China’s imperial past with export art, the grandeur of European court life, architecture, and the botanical world.

The early twenty-first century saw the emergence of China as a leader in the fashion world, and the exhibition reveals the career trajectory of Guo Pei—hailed as China’s first couturier—within this context. The presentation further traces Guo Pei’s use of embroidery, and explores the relationship between Chinese theater and fashion in her work.

“For Guo Pei, each collection starts with a philosophical idea—a spark of inspiration—drawn from a wide range of sources from her personal life and travels, as well as art and architecture, literature, and nature. Layers of meaning and imagery form a bricolage of opulent surfaces imposed upon sculptural silhouettes,” explains Jill D’Alessandro, Curator in Charge of Costume and Textile Arts.