Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy at Legion of Honor

Grand Slang is used for the identity of Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy, an exhibition at the Legion of Honor museum that charts the trajectory of Guo Pei’s career as a leader in the fashion world in the early twenty-first century. Through exquisite craftsmanship, lavish embroidery, and unconventional dressmaking techniques, Guo Pei creates a fantasy that fuses the influences of China’s imperial past, decorative arts, European architecture, and the botanical world.

Guo Pei’s body of work demonstrates a vast imagination that results in great stylistic variety. Although there is no singular language that defines each collection, her vision is dominated by the notion of world-building, fantasy, and theatricality.

Focusing on the craft of the garments, the exhibition title lock-up was designed to behave like textiles through the creation of custom ligatures, interlocking letterforms together to create a pattern or texture. This treatment references not only the medium of textiles but also conjures images of the garden, root structures, as well as architecture—all recurring visual motifs in Guo Pei’s designs.

Design: Lizzie Baur
Art direction: Amy Browne, Ben Shaykin, Alejandro Stein
Exhibition design and graphics: Chris Busch and Kate Agarwal