Guo Pei's encounter at Paris Couture Week

'This season, Pei more or less opened couture week with an extravagant costume drama presentation, her inventive funky and original designs surprised me. I expected gaudy silk dresses and folk costumes. She certainly gave Gaultier a run for his money in terms of creating amusingly brilliant dresses.'(The Daily Beast)

Once again, Guo Pei, the Asian Couture Federation’s ‘Couturier Extraordinaire’ dazzled the fashion press with her latest AW16 collection, shown on the first day of Paris Couture Week. There were 29 unique pieces of work in the collection exercising the idea of ‘encounter’ and having Pei’s musings on ‘dreams’, ‘reality’ and ‘karma’ as spiritual underpinnings. There was also a recurrence of ‘Dragon’ as the leading symbol throughout the whole collection executed in magnificent, gold thread embroidery. Unlike Pei’s 2012 ‘ The Legend of Dragon’ edition the pattern for the Paris show has been aesthetically modified and transformed to blend seamlessly with each look.

As always at the core of the collection was Guo Pei’s unparalleled craft this time ‘playing’ with specially sourced materials with a metallic shine as well as rich colour palette that brought warmth to the glossy ambience of Bourse de Commerce, Pei’s AW16 show venue in Paris. The ACF’s extraordinary designer has also managed to introduce her soon-to-be-released shoe line and thoroughly comfortable 15cm heels, tried & tested by all the models at her Parisian showcase.

The ‘grand finale’ dress in signature Guo Pei style took more than 20000 hours to complete truly showing the couture prowess of the brand and it’s atelier that has hand-sewn hundreds of thousands pieces of sequins and decorations on this sweepingly, stunning dress.

‘The level of craftsmanship never wavered but shone brightest with the final dress; its single peaked shoulder, jewelled embroideries, and funnelling train ridged in countless pearlescent embellishments seemed destined for a queen bee’ (VOGUE)