Everyone in fashion knows that Andrew Gn is a brilliant colorist. Even when he’s doing minimalism, he’s staying true to his maximalist heart whether through fabric, saturated color, or embellishment. His fall show opened with a case in point: a series of comparatively austere, solid-colored dresses, in sober black or white embellished with vintage handcrafted buttons. Those were followed by jewel-tone dresses, with or without fabulous faux bijoux, at times in meticulously pleated, sultry lamé. One fitted emerald midi-dress, for example, featured rose-hued jewels anchored at the neckline and was left tremblant at the ends. At that point, the designer was still just warming up.
Backstage before the show, Gn mentioned that he’d been revisiting George Cukor’s 1976 American-Soviet children’s fantasy film The Blue Bird. The movie tanked at the box office despite a stellar cast, with Elizabeth Taylor as Mother/Queen of Light, Jane Fonda as Night, and Ava Gardner as Luxury. But all that OTT set Gn down a mystical path: think griffins, gold, galaxies, and epic yarns, from the Norwegian fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon (which Gn read in Chinese as a boy) to Ramayana and medieval mythology.
Filtered through Gn’s prism, those disparate influences yielded an eye-catching story. Highlights included a couple of tweed ensembles; a brocade coat with jeweled buttons and Byzantine appliqués; and pieces with fragments of the cosmos frozen in sequins, for example on an oversized tweed coat and a long black gown. As a parting shot, the griffin appeared in a lavishly worked cape.
As he readily admits, the designer is never happy with any one thing, and to wit he slipped a stylized letter A into the mix on a grouping of bold-hued Byzantine prints. Not everyone can rock all that, but one thing seems clear: Every Gn loyalist out there will find something she loves in here that she can wear now and for seasons to come.
