Last week, fashion lovers from New York, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Shanghai, South Africa, and beyond flocked to Singapore to celebrate the inauguration of “Andrew Gn: Fashioning Singapore and the World” at the Asian Civilisations Museum. The swirl around that event eddied well beyond the clothes at the heart of it all. A culture maven and fanatical foodie, Gn squired guests around his town for days, from private previews at the ACM and a tour of its sister entity, the Peranakan museum—whose collections illuminate the designer’s personal history and oeuvre—to bustling canteens in Little India and Chinatown, plus an intimate private dinner at the Michelin-starred restaurant Candlenut.
“The people who accompanied me on my journey are here, they saw the whole thing, so it’s not just about me, it’s about friendship and the fruit of our work,” the designer said. On Friday night, “Fashioning Singapore and the World” opened to tears of joy, champagne, and lashings of psychedelic confetti. Among those present to congratulate Gn were the event’s ambassadress, the Singapore-born, Paris-based investment banker and actress Sharon Au, Crazy Rich Asians actress Fiona Xiè, and Farfetch CEO—and newly minted Harvard Business School grad—Elizabeth von der Goltz.
As one of the designer’s earliest supporters stateside, Von der Goltz helped grow Gn’s couture business at Bergdorf Goodman but, in a personal aside, she said she knew years before meeting her future husband which Gn look she would pick for her wedding day: a strapless gown with a tiered, ruffled hem from the runway, which Gn adapted for her in white eyelet. Bridal dresses aside, she reckons she has 20 or so Gn pieces in her closet, plus 10 or 15 that belong to her mother. “I told Andrew we should go through my archive,” she laughed.
Parsed into five galleries over two floors, “Fashioning Singapore” offers a comprehensive overview of Gn’s three-decade career, with an emphasis on representations of Asia in fashion. But more than an exhibition, the 112 items on display are the lion’s share of a 160- piece donation from the country’s best-known fashion prodigy. Gn’s gift will seed ACM’s collection of contemporary fashion design.
“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.
A casual onlooker may simply admire, for example, the jeweled buttons winking on an elegant black dress from last winter’s Promised Land collection (Queen Rania of Jordan wore that number for the official announcement of Crown Prince Hussein’s engagement to Rajwa Al-Saif), but those ornaments embody a world of meaning all on their own. Handmade in France or in Italy, they are a modern iteration of the kerosang heirloom brooches worn in Peranakan culture, and notably by Gn’s beloved grandmother. The floral tendrils curling up a resort 2016 gown that Fan BingBing wore on the cover of Vogue Taiwan are more than just tulips and carnations, they hark back to a 16th-century Turkish vase. A pink toile de Jouy dress that nods to Madame de Pompadour, or a printed, embroidered silk Coromandel dress represent Gn at his most meta: Eastern-born art forms created for the Western gaze, reinterpreted centuries later as high fashion by a Singaporean designer rooted in both worlds.
For those interested in trying their hand at design, one room invites visitors to explore darting techniques or embellish cut-out paper collars with crystals. For the tech-fluent, an interactive “Fashion Try-On” based on radio frequency identification technology lets users play magpie, collecting signature butterflies, flowers, stars, and other motifs on a bracelet. On the ground floor, an atelier-style space featuring original sketches, show lineups and a reconstruction of an early window display at Colette then lets users step into an AR fitting room, upload their digital trove and DIY their own Andrew Gn gown. The final result can be captured in a virtual red carpet portrait and then printed, emailed, or posted.
Curator Jackie Yoong said that when she traveled to Paris to cull favorites from Gn’s archive—numbering some 10,000 runway pieces accrued over 85 collections—she took some cues from last year’s “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” exhibition at the MET, gleaning direction from Andrew Bolton’s curation. “Fashion is about society and culture at a given point in time. We’re not inventing new histories, it’s about telling stories in 3D,” she said. “I saw parallels between the two [shows] because while American style is a lot more familiar thanks to Hollywood and how you see people dress, both nations are made up of immigrants from very diverse communities. Andrew’;s is a small but significant label that shows a different way into fashion. I think he expresses himself from a place of understanding: there’s no need to associate ‘home’ with a single location, and the magic of his touch is that he makes it all wearable.”
While Gn is now the toast of Garden City, “Fashioning Singapore” is a shared milestone. For ACM, it marks a 25th anniversary, the unveiling of a major renovation, and the reveal of its largest contemporary fashion retrospective to date. It also signals a fresh chapter: On the eve of the opening, a fundraising gala held in the ballroom at the five-star Fullerton Hotel drew 350 glamorous and heavily bejeweled guests who swelled the museum’s coffers to the tune of S$1.3 million (nearly $965,000), well above the original target. Those funds will be used to grow the ACM’s holdings, with a focus on cross-cultural influences and permutations of Asia in fashion.
“Being able to collect contemporary design is a real source of pride for us,” said ACM director Kennie Ting. “Despite the nationalistic posturing that’s going on these days, the idea that cultures have always interacted is very important to us. People came to Singapore from everywhere and learned from each other, leading to new forms of creative expression. That kind of mixing, borrowing, and coming together to create beauty is what we stand for, and you can see so much of that in Andrew’s work.”
Gn himself plans to increase his gift by another 250 pieces or so. “Like a good father, I want my clothes to have a life of their own, in the right conditions,” he offered. The designer is currently in discussions with a handful of museums in Europe and the US about taking his show on the road, perhaps as early as next year. “Singapore may not be the largest country, but its eclectic, open spirit means we can definitely communicate with the world in the language of beauty and art,” he said.
Andrew Gn: Fashioning Singapore and the World will run at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore through September 17, 2023.