A perennial go-to for clients with a fully saturated social agenda, Andrew Gn has been staging a youth-quake for several seasons now. Of course, in Gn’s world “elevated street” means that a fringed T-shirt may come with guipure appliqué, and top-stitched, fringed linen cargos may be finished with ribbons. These, together with the designer’s usual signatures—a print inspired by 18th-century wallpaper, a labor-intensive black-and-white dress with guipure appliqué—made this Resort collection one of his most successful in recent memory.
That’s also because Gn has moved to take climactic extremes into consideration: Paris saw winter in June this year until a heat wave hit just in time for Couture Week. In response, Gn is incorporating more all-season outerwear, like tweed jackets, as well as straight-up Resort wear, so that his clients can pick up what they need when they need it.
He is also becoming increasingly attuned to no-waste design. “We want to make beautiful pieces to keep, so you don’t need to buy 10 things, you can buy one,” he explained. Hence the recent incorporation of stocks of vintage lace or silk prints and more vegetal dyes. “It just takes a bit more patience and time [to source], and you find amazing things that will never be produced again,” he said. Case in point: He recently picked up a hoard of 1960s lace from a factory in Calais. Some of it turned up in Resort, as an overlay on a pink dress with a pleated skirt. On other pieces, Gn develops the embellishments himself, such as the white lace on a Wedgwood blue dress, or his signature butterflies.
Gn’s customers tend to buy things and keep them forever—one of them coined the term “hallowed pieces,” the designer said. Now that his e-business has ramped up, he’s embarking on more experiential shopping, for example, with the likes of Moda Operandi: Last week in Paris, Gn mingled with his ladies at a private dinner cohosted by Princess Astrid of Liechtenstein. “For us, it’s always been about the experience,” the designer noted.
