How This Chinese Designer Eked Her Way Into the Very Male, Very European World of Haute Couture

How This Chinese Designer Eked Her Way Into the Very Male, Very European World of Haute Couture

The piece, originally made by Guo Pei in 2010, was loaned to Rihanna for the Met show China Through the Looking Glass. "[Guo Pei] said she did. In a Q&A, edited for length, BrettKelley explained some of the drive and entrepreneurship that attracted her to Guo Pei as a subject. Why is the Council a big deal, and what exactly is haute couture? [The rules require that fashion creations be hand-sewn, that designers maintain an atelier and employees in Paris and put on a haute couture show twice a year.] What were your impressions of the haute couture world itself? That's where Guo Pei isn't following the line. She was trying to get the manager of the studio to try to work with her to make more production line garments so she could sell more and fund her work. So Guo Pei was saying, "Well, if you can't do this, I'm going to go under and if I go under, you're going to go under." Something about Guo Pei's business model I found really fascinating was that people paid in advance; they became members -- there was that scene with a VIP client who spent nearly a million dollars.

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In ‘Yellow Is Forbidden,’ we meet the entrepreneur who designed the fabulous yellow cape Rihanna wore to the Met Gala in 2015. You remember that, don’t you?

How This Chinese Designer Eked Her Way Into the Very Male, Very European World of Haute Couture

Eyes popped and jaws dropped on a spring evening in May 2015 when a slender young woman clad in shimmering yellow began what would be a fateful, if unsteady, walk along the red carpet at New York’s Metropolitan Museum Gala.

She was, of course, the pop star Rihanna, and the mega-wattage cape she trailed behind her was such a fashion statement, such an intricate piece of handwork — 100 percent covered in embroidery — that it weighed 50 pounds and required a three-man entourage just to haul it up the Met steps.

“It was a phenomenal piece,” says the New Zealand filmmaker Pietra BrettKelly, whose documentary film Yellow Is Forbidden premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend. The film’s subject is the Chinese designer behind Rihanna’s cape — Guo Pei (pronounced gwo pay), one of the world’s foremost fashion entrepreneurs, though one relatively unknown in the West.

Until Rihanna donned that gold cape, that is. “It was incredibly intricate, all handmade. It took hundreds of thousands of hours to create,” BrettKelley told Entrepreneur. The piece, originally made by Guo Pei in 2010, was loaned to Rihanna for the Met show China Through the Looking Glass. But, in spite of Rihanna’s worldwide fame, there was no guarantee that her request for the loan was a done deal.

For starters: Guo Pei had never heard of her. “Guo Pei wanted to meet Rihanna and see if she had the right personality and the presence and the soul — if she was the right person — to wear it,” the filmmaker said. “[Guo Pei] said she did. She said to me, ‘I made her queen. I sensed that presence and that regal-ness.’

Which meant Guo Pei would loan out the garment. Lucky Rihanna.

In a Q&A, edited for length, BrettKelley explained some of the drive and entrepreneurship that attracted her to Guo Pei as a subject. How did this girl, born into modest means to communist survivors of China’s Cultural Revolution, transform into an international superstar and win the “invited status” she can now flaunt, to the the overwhelmingly male and European Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture?

San Laurent … Dior … Givenchy … Armani … Those are the denizens of haute couture who invited her in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The film’s title refers to the difficult years of China’s Cultural Revolution, which Guo Pei’s parents — a batalion leader in the People’s Army, and her mother, a kindergarten teacher, whom we meet in the film — lived through. Please explain.

During the dynasties in China, yellow or gold was forbidden in China for commoners, for anyone beyond the royalty, the emperors. It was a color that was special to them, and only for them to wear, a dynastic color. During the Cultural Revolution, of course, no one was encouraged to wear anything bright or colorful; it was very drab clothing; and her parents and people of that generation still say you should not wear yellow; you should not be wearing gold. Her mother because of [partial blindness] doesn’t even know about the Rihanna dress, doesn’t know about a lot of Guo Pei’s designs, doesn’t know that she uses gold a lot.

In the film, we learn that Guo Pei won “invited member” status to Paris’s Haute Couture Council and was named to Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2016. Why is the Council a big deal, and what exactly is haute couture?

It’s the pinnacle of fashion to fit into that group; it’s an enormous acknowledgement to get to that. That is in itself the prize; but for others with a big company, that is part of their marketing, their placement within the fashion world, to say they are haute couture [a phrase that in France legally may be used only by the elite…

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