For anyone who figures that showing via Zoom is respite from the runway, Andrew Gn would like to set the record straight: Doing things virtually is even more work-intensive. To that end, he spent the last several months upping his technical savvy, and he brought the young Swiss filmmaker Le Jozy to his light-filled, Coromandel-lined showroom salon to shoot the four-minute video revealed here.
“Like so many, during lockdown I was reassessing my purpose and my work—there’s so much energy that goes into handling uncertainties, and that’s even before you start designing the clothes,” Gn said. The eye-opener came when an old friend called from San Francisco to place an order because she wanted to look forward to wearing it at Christmas.
“I realized that in times like these we should always project, find something positive,” he observed. “Beauty is such an important thing in life. If you don’t see beauty, you don’t see the future.” He named his spring collection “May there be light.” For Gn, happier times mean blue skies and the purity of white, with ample texture and haute bohemian mixes of transparency and guipure lace, as well as practical flourishes like a removable statement collar. Joie de vivre, he realized, can be as easy as a swish of fringe (not coincidentally a favorite on TikTok). And he channeled hope into prints with painterly, contemporary impressions of cherry blossoms on a black, sky blue, or café au lait ground.
In a more figurative vein, the designer looked to the kimonos his mother wore in the ’70s for “Iris Border,” a panoramic print he used on midi dresses and a trio of long silhouettes, notably a jumpsuit with a bustier top. As usual, he also reached further back, to the 17th century for his collars and to the 18th for a crossover drape inspired by dresses “à la Polonaise,” adapted on the sleeve of an otherwise minimal belted jacket in summer denim.
Gn also made a bid for brevity, for example in a thigh-grazing white plissé dress with black and white daffodil appliqué, in black and white tweed dresses embellished with buttons inspired by a Maltese cross, and in a number of looks with high-waisted shorts. (After wearing sweats for so long, there’s also joy in flashing a little leg, the designer quipped.)
Absent the occasion to wear sumptuous evening gowns, Gn noted that his base is asking for clothes that are “comfortable but not one-wear wonders.” His response for evening: a strong-shouldered black column dress he calls the Joan Crawford, which also happens to be reasonably priced for the designer’s habitual eco-sphere. “Now is not the moment to be weird,” he said. “The future is happening now, and my job is to bring pleasure and hope.”
