Meet Guo Pei, the Designer of Rihanna’s Magnificent Met Gala Look
The woman behind Rihanna’s spectacular Met Gala look, Chinese designer Guo Pei. (Photo: Getty Images)
Someday you’ll look back and tell your grandchildren where you were on Monday night, May 4, 2015, when Rihanna appeared at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art wearing a fur-trimmed yellow brocade coat with a train that followed her for what seemed like forever. Three people behind her, lifting and fluffing. As soon as the world caught its breath, it collectively wondered, “Who is RiRi wearing?”
The answer is Guo Pei, a Chinese couturière who has been making intricate and glamorous gowns in China for almost 30 years. Although not well-known in the West, Pei is no stranger to the red carpet, regularly dressing actresses such as Li Bingbing and Zhang Ziyi. Two of her pieces are in the Met’s exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass. One of them, “Magnificent Gold,” is a gold-brocade gown that fills an entire room and has already become a social media staple. It reportedly took 50,000 hours to make. It is also Pei’s favorite dress: “I wanted to express the spirit of a king and the spirit of the sun,” she says of the inspiration behind the dress. “Now I see it in the exhibition and I feel differently. It has been reinterpreted, and appears very quiet, like a lotus flower blossoming before the Buddhas, to honor them.”
Rihanna in a couture coat by Guo Pei at the Met Gala. (Photo: Getty Images)
Pei is, of course, proud to see her work included in such a celebration because she gets to be part of something that represents her culture and her country. And it’s not the only way she’s bringing awareness to her homeland — Pei recently collaborated with makeup giant MAC on a line of cosmetics. Her inspiration was as esoteric as that behind her gowns: “a garden, but a spiritual garden,” she explained. “We plant beautiful things in our hearts like seeds, and they grow like flowers and help us find happiness within. I want to tell people through my work that the happiness in your life depends on yourself.” So what does that mean for the actual makeup? Peachy pinks and coral shades for the lips, and a very deep blue color for the eyes (“the color of the soul”), all wrapped in gilded compacts with delicate flower trim.
Guo Pei’s “Magnificent Gold” dress on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Photo: Getty Images)
This is all a long way from when Pei enrolled in fashion school in the 1980s, a time when China was just starting to open itself up to the outside world. Her professor’s knowledge was somewhat limited; after watching a western movie that featured a voluminous wedding dress, Pei asked the teacher to show her how to make one, only to find that he didn’t know. “In 1982, there was no sense of fashion; China was a completely different country,” Pei explained. “I learned the basics at school: cutting, painting, expressing my thoughts through the silhouettes, but the fashion, the trims, the embroideries, all the other skilled work, I taught myself.” She adds, “It’s all the things designers learn gradually.”
A Guo Pei dress that’s now on display as part of the Met’s exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass.” (Photo: Getty Images)
After school, Pei became a children’s-clothing designer before eventually launching her eponymous collection, which she intentionally priced up so that she could make a living without having to produce many pieces. With Pei, it was always quality before quantity, a feeling that remains with her to this day, as her relative anonymity in the United States is about to break. “I don’t wish for people to like my work just because of me; I’d rather it be the other way around,” says Pei as a way of explaining that she doesn’t care for the hype — “I would rather they like my work and then like me.” So when Rihanna contacted her after researching Chinese couturiers online, Pei was happy that it was the yellow coat/gown, from a 2010 collection, that had drawn her in first. “I wasn’t nervous when she approached me,” Pei remembers, “just a little bit concerned whether she would be able to handle the dress because it’s very heavy and big.” (Which is funny, since in a 2010 profile of Pei in the New York Times, Cathy Horyn writes that Lady Gaga wanted to wear her clothes but found them too cumbersome.) “She gives this dress a completely different look with her absolute confidence; she brings another kind of beauty to my work,” Pei says of Rihanna. “She looks like a queen.” Takes one to know one.
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