“It’s an immense honor, almost overwhelming,” said Gn. “Everything here tells a story about my life and the effort that goes into telling it. All of these elements come together and, while every collection is a little bit like that, seeing 28 years of my work in one place is really emotional.”
As a teen, Gn found precious few resources with which he could learn about fashion. If he couldn’t get his hands on one of the three copies of Vogue that would make it to Singapore, he’d hone his eye at Man and His Woman, a now long-shuttered Orchard Road shop run by Judith Chung, who brought designs by Issey Miyake, Kenzo, and Thierry Mugler to the island nation. A decade or so later, a year spent at Parsons in New York gave him access to garments by American designers like Claire McCardell, Geoffrey Beene, and John Galanos in the FIT archives.
“I thought that was really wonderful and generous,” the designer recalled. “Paris is my home, but that doesn’t change how your heart feels. Now I feel like giving back to my country, the industry, and people who want to study the craft of making clothes.” Fittingly, “Fashioning Singapore” opens with a red carpet lineup of looks featured in Vogue or worn by celebrities, royalty, and other influential women around the world. They include the romantic white lace dress Emma Stone wore in her Oscar-winning role in La La Land, a black pagoda-shouldered dress sported by Lily Collins in Emily in Paris, and a hot pink silk satin gown with a draped bustier customized for Beyoncé from his fall 2010 Persian Letters collection. A little black dress with a guipure lace collar from the spring 2021 May There Be Light collection was donned by Lady Gaga not for a photo call but for a stroll through the streets of New York as a private citizen.
For most visitors, the show offers a chance to examine the couture-level craftsmanship in Gn’s work. Season after season, his love of history, textiles, and the arts—not to mention the porcelains, ceramics, and other decorative objects he collects and displays in his Paris homes—crystallizes in a joyful cross-pollination of opulent brocades and jacquards, lavish prints, intricate embroideries and beadwork reprising, variously, graceful splays of coral, currents in art, heavenly bodies, and universal symbols such as a golden phoenix rising from its ashes.
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