Nearly six years after Rihanna's spectacular appearance at the traditional fashion gala, her dress signed by Chinese designer Guo Pei is on display at an art gallery in Vancouver, Canada.
Although last year, due to the pandemic, the traditional event was not possible, the annual charity event that kicks off the fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and is organized by Vogue magazine, this 2021 will be Rematch.
This time with a double event "that will reflect America's evolving notions of identity and explore a multitude of perspectives through presentations that speak to some of the complexities of history with powerful immediacy," fashion will be worshiped North American.
The exhibition will open on September 18 and will be the finishing touch for Fashion Week in New York, which will be held on September 13. As expected, the long-awaited gala will feature a small group of guests, with Anna Wintour –among others– as presidents.
Coinciding with the announcement of the MET Gala and six years after the magnificent appearance of Rihanna (33) who made history at that gala, the yellow dress that she wore in the 2015 edition is exhibited in Vancouver, Canada.
Designed by Chinese designer Guo Pei, the monumental work of art that took 20 months to make and weighs 25 kilos is the star of the "Guo Pei: Couture Beyond" exhibition, mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The exhibition traces the creator's career and the dramatic pieces of haute couture that she imagined and carried out for more than ten years. "I envisioned a queen when creating this 'Yellow Empress Gown'. In my opinion, being a queen takes more charm and responsibility than physical beauty. So I used the weight of the dress to mark the difficulty of being a royal and becoming a queen." a strong woman," said the dressmaker, famous for dressing the celebrities of her country but much more for the dress worn by the singer born in Barbados.
The piece, which took him 55,000 hours of work and was the cover of Vogue in 2015 in a special edition, earned him a solo exhibition that same year at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Now on display in Vancouver, the story of that dress, for which she combined skills from her vocation for haute couture with the couture tradition of her native country, takes on new relevance.
The dress that belongs to the collection entitled One Thousand and Two Nights (102 nights), was a challenge for the designer because she was not sure that Rihanna could handle such a weight. "It was only after she showed up on the red carpet that she emailed me asking how much she weighed. I told her 55lbs. I didn't mention it to her before because I was afraid she wouldn't wear it," the creator revealed.
When she entered the red carpet of the MET gala with her canary yellow dress, with an egg yolk-colored stole and embroidered with flowers, Rihanna was assisted by three people so that she could carry the large train that was all the rage.
Who is Guo Pei, the Chinese designer who conquered the world
The daughter of a high-ranking Communist Party official and a preschool teacher, Guo Pei was born in Beijing in 1967. Her love of color, which she left behind in the exclusive design for Rihanna, was born out of her exhaustion from seeing so many people dressed gray "People's clothes were gray, mostly. There wasn't much color," recalled the designer.
"I distinctly remember wanting to wear a yellow dress as a child, but my grandmother told me that normal people weren't allowed to wear yellow," she later recalled. That childhood wish of hers is the genesis of the historic piece that remained in the history of fashion and allowed her to transcend to fame outside of her country.
