A couple of films inspired Andrew Gn’s intentionally seasonless Fall collection, and both star Catherine Deneuve. Released more than a dozen years apart, each had to do with love triangles: Belle de Jour, from 1967 and The Hunger, from 1983. “I loved the sexual undercurrents in both,” Gn offered. “Both characters look extremely bourgeois, but appearances can be deceiving. Underneath there are dark secrets, this burning desire.” Also, “they’re all so well dressed,” he said. It’s not often you hear a designer connect cult films to a darkness behind smiling emoji as a metaphor for our times.
Gn also cherry-picked from his “favorite things in life,” among them fern fronds, 17th-century pietra dura, and peacock feathers, using those motifs to showcase couture-like craftsmanship. The opening look, a crepe A-line dress with gold thread embroidery and eyelet ruffles, was a case in point, in the Belle de Jour vein. Elsewhere, Gn went for sculpted ruffles, for example on a powder-pink midi dress with peacock-feather appliqué. Further along, a platinum pleated dress had perhaps the most red carpet appeal; its metallic embroidered bustier took untold hours to complete.
“I believe that luxury is things done by hand,” Gn said. “In the future, there will be fewer and fewer of them. I believe handiwork is the way to create things that last.” That, and perhaps a new hashtag, #IFeelAGN. Clients and fans posting on Instagram added their own adjectives—sexy, powerful, unstoppable, etc.—before the designer’s initials. Asked for his own, the designer quipped, “I feel again, again and AGN!”
