Guo Pei's Golden Dialogue Shimmers in Chengdu
Five years. Eight artisans. Thirty gold-thread embroidery techniques sourced from across the globe, all converging on a single wedding dress. This is how Guo Pei works—not in seasons or collections, but at a pace fashion has mostly abandoned, building garments that function as repositories of craft. The dress doesn't just shimmer. It is an encyclopaedia of what human hands can do with gold and thread.
This level of commitment anchors "In the Thread of Gold: The Art of Dressing from the Orient to the Land of the Rising Sun," the exhibition that was first unveiled at Musée du quai Branly earlier this year and is now travelling to Chengdu Museum in China, running from November 30, 2025, to March 29, 2026.
Guo Pei’s creations
Guo Pei, China's foremost couturier, has never been interested in clothes that simply flatter. Her pieces carry weight—cultural, technical, symbolic. The wedding dress proves it: thirty techniques mean thirty different traditions, thirty ways gold can move across fabric. It is not decoration; it is a dialogue of crafts.
"In the Thread of Gold" traces gold's long-standing allure in textile arts. From the fifth millennium BCE, when gold first adorned ceremonial garments for Europe's elite, to contemporary uses in Maison Lesage's intricate embroideries for Chanel, Givenchy, and Jean-Paul Gaultier, gold has always signified wealth, divinity, and refinement.
"From the first ornaments sewn onto the garments of the deceased in Bulgaria to the glittering kimonos of Japan and the gold-woven silks of the Indian and Indonesian worlds, this exhibition reveals the thousand-year history of gold in the textile arts," states curator Hana Al Banna-Chidiac. Three themed areas surprise visitors by presenting materials that are gold in colour but contain no actual metal: silk from the fan mussel (a Mediterranean Sea shell), silk from the golden silk orb-weaver spiders of Madagascar (Nephilia), and silk from silkworms (Bombyx mori) in Cambodia.
Guo Pei's creations are threaded throughout the exhibition, acting as a golden link between eras and continents. Where Lesage refines and preserves specific techniques with jeweller's precision, Guo Pei collects them. She works as curator and creator, pulling methods from different worlds and making them speak to each other. The result is immersive, maximalist, designed to envelop and astonish rather than simply enhance.
From the gold-woven silks of India and Indonesia to the shimmering kimonos of the Edo era, In the Thread of Gold celebrates skill, history, and cultural storytelling. Here, couture is not merely decoration or display—it is a living dialogue of craft, culture, and imagination, where every stitch carries memory, meaning, and wonder.
Exhibition Dates: November 30, 2025 – March 29, 2026
