Back in September, the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, opened the American debut of Andrew Gn: Fashioning the World, celebrating the work of the renowned Singaporean designer and artist.
Working together with the Asian Civilisations Museum the exhibition, which will be open until February 16, 2026, showcases almost a hundred pieces of opulent apparel, accessories, illustrations and digital media, all examples of the virtuoso’s exquisite blend of heritage and history.
Petra Slinkard, who has been PEM’s Director of Curatorial Affairs and The Nancy B. Putnam Curator of Fashion and Textiles since 2018, met with me to talk about the exhibition and why work like Gn’s feels so vital right now, even though the demi-couturier chose to close his fashion house in late 2023 to focus on his art.
Gn’s work is very much about engaging, about finding thoughts and ideas which overlap in such a way that they bring people together. There is a reverence to Andrew Gn’s designs, and a patently obvious joy; both of which seem to be in short supply right now. So, seeing a globally-renowned museum like PEM choosing to highlight such an important artistic vision inspires hope for the future. A better future.
Beauty is Everywhere
“Andrew has this ability to see beauty everywhere,” Slinkard told me, and it was obvious that she understood what I was getting at. “He is an absolute sponge when it comes to absorbing elements of history and literature, film and art and culture and food. When I was working with the design team, I kept using this visual; there’s all of this stuff floating around up here that he is absorbing and drawing on and discovering and researching. And it all comes in through a funnel, which is him and his brain. It comes through that sieve, and then it is put out into the world as this really refined clothing. But, if you unpack all the various layers of reference in his clothes, you start to learn that there’s so much narrative there. And it’s not always evident from just looking at the clothing. It’s this kind of interesting juxtaposition of really old and storied, and new, and sort of reborn or like discovering itself in a way. ”
“His perspective is truly a global perspective,” she continued, “which is really born of his own personal lived experience, like being born and raised in Singapore, which is a cosmopolitan, multicultural, multinational place that has centuries worth of history.”
Of course, any year would be a good one to focus on Gn’s incredible work, but 2025 has an additional layer of importance, which I asked the curator to help me understand and explain.
“In 2025 Singapore celebrated its jubilee anniversary,” Slinkard explained, “60 years of independence. Andrew had started working with Jackie Yoong, the Senior Curator of Design at the Asian Civilizations Museum. They were just starting a fashion collection, and he offered to help build the foundation for that. Their first major contemporary fashion exhibition as a museum was the Andrew Gn Show in 2023.”
I wanted to know if this PEM exhibition was the same, or how it was connected, and how this all came to be when the designer was still in the process of closing his maison and shifting his focus to other work.
“When we began talking with them about doing this exhibition,” Slinkard said, “I hadn’t known at that point in time that Andrew was going to close his house. But he and the Asian Civilizations Museum were super gracious and so we entered into this partnership. The exhibition at PEM is really our own exhibition. They lent us 11 pieces, and they gave us their label copy. We rewrote all of our own label copy because we rearranged the themes. But they’ve been excellent partners to us. And one of the things that I had spoken to Jackie about, though, was how to draw out the Singaporean narrative.”
I asked her to tell me more about that. PEM is the museum with the largest and most comprehensive collection, literally in the whole world, of Asian Export Art, a transcultural and diverse body of work. It felt logical for the museum to take on an exhibition with such a global scope, but I wanted to hear their perspective.
“For a Singaporean institution to talk about a Singaporean designer,” Slinkard explained, “you don’t have to explain to your audience what Singapore is. But we knew that there are not a lot of people in the U.S. who maybe necessarily understand where it is, what it is, what its history is. We felt that it was important to sort of call that out, both as a way to point to Andrew’s own lived experiences and how that generated and formulated his lens. But also just to talk about a place that is multicultural and whose history is really important.”
Moreover, I learned, there are deep, historic connections between Salem and Singapore, and that sort of international collaboration is a small piece of what makes PEM so special.
“Then, the third facet,” Slinkard continued, “we felt institutionally that there were some interesting parallels around Salem being such a small community, now in 2025, only 45,000 people. But once upon a time being this like super mighty city in the very new United States, that was a port city. And so much of its economic development was driven through this global trade. the same is true for Singapore. So we saw this parallel almost kind of like a sister city situation, even though we’re not sister cities.
But there was this interesting parallel, historically, in which Salem developed and the way in which Singapore has developed. And knowing that 2025 was going to be the anniversary, it just kind of made sense. It wasn’t our original intention to open it in 2025, in honour of the anniversary, but it did feel like the right thing to do.”
When the show opened, on September 13, 2025, a delegation came from Singapore, including their newly appointed Minister of Culture, both to support Andrew Gn and to celebrate the PEM exhibition.
“It all worked out really nicely,” the curator said to me with a smile. There are a couple of instances in Andrew’s collections where his work draws specifically from historic Singaporean dress, and that was a wonderful aspect for us to be able to draw attention to. I have seen him as this personification of Singapore’s growth. And this really beautiful trajectory of a nation on the rise.”
Gn’s work, as you can doubtlessly tell from the images included herein, is incredibly detailed. He uses embroidery, beadwork and a wide range of decorative motifs that are both cross-cultural and rather impressively inclusive. I told Slinkard that I’m never certain how well people understand the amount of labor that goes into work like this. Or, from a museum or a conservation perspective, the massive amount of care that goes into making certain that every carefully placed bead stays in place, protected for future generations. Especially since a whole section of the exhibition is titled The Magic is in the Details.
“Andrew’s work is interesting because like a Mainbocher or Halston, the silhouettes, the construction is relatively straightforward,” Slinkard explained. “They’re simple. There’s not a lot of underpinnings, there’s not a lot of heavy structure. He’s usually using one zipper, one hook and eye. The intention is for the clothing to be comfortable. His philosophy around clothing was that he wanted women to, ‘step in, zip up and go.’ So it is the ornamentation, the surface design where the pieces really sing. And I learned a lot about Andrew’s practice by visiting his studio in Paris and visiting the Atelier.”
In addition to the materials lent or gifted from the Asian Civilizations Museum, Gn, very graciously, donated some of his embroidery samples to PEM. I learned how important to the exhibition and to the museum.
“We now have the markings that nod to the communication between the house of Andrew Gn and the family artisans that he’s working with,” Slinkard told me, “in Como or in Lyon or in Switzerland. He and his house were really very dedicated to working with these small mom and pop artisan specialists. You know, like one family to just do the lace, one just to do the embroidery. There’s a spectacular piece on view where the flowers that are appliqued and attached to the bodice look like little floral cutouts, but they’re actually made of sequins, all of the petals are sequined.”
“There’s another great ensemble where he’s working with a textile firm in Milan that specializes in furnishings. And he even says, kind of jokingly, it was a bit of a risk because no woman wants to be wrapped in a rug or wear a rug. But he was really intrigued by the textile and he wanted to do something outside of his comfort zone. He did, and it was a success. As a designer, Andrew’s vision and philosophy around heritage, quality and craftsmanship are unwavering.”
The use of these components from these artisan houses, in the work produced by the house of Andrew Gn, are a reflection of his practices, of his process. I wanted to know more about how the samples, along with the designers original illustrations and ephemera, were useful to PEM and the goals the institution sets for itself and the exhibitions it produces.
“Andrew’s atelier was maybe like eight people, and everything was hand-drawn in the studio. We have this great pairing in the gallery where you can see the toiles and the paper designs that are then applied to the surface of the muslin. I’ve used them a lot in the gallery to help educate people. I think it reinforces his artistry, because the muslin ground is the canvas and then it’s the composition that he’s actually literally laying out, like flower by flower by flower, basting them in place, creating a trompe-l’oeil collar or these trompe-l’oeil cuffs and then it goes out to be embroidered. So truly, that reinforces and emphasizes that custom nature of the work. And as you know, like not that many houses are really doing that these days; it is very labor intensive. And yes, they are valuable pieces, but I think he very strongly believed that a form of sustainability, and an important one, is that when you make things that are of quality, they last. They are truly timeless and they can be worn over and over again or they can be handed down. There’s the possibility of generational wear when you set out intentionally to make works of high quality.”
My lovely readers know how important fashion books are to me, so before our conversation ended, I made sure to ask the curator about the gorgeous volume which accompanies and expounds upon the exhibit.
“There’s a wealth of information in it,” Petra Slinkard told me. “I think that the subtitle, Fashioning the World, works from two vantages. One, he is a designer with a global reach, meaning that his clientele ranges from women across the globe, and that his reference points, the way in which he sees the world, the way in which he designs, the way, the places, the things, the ideas from which he draws inspiration, are also global in perspective.”
The Peabody Essex Museum exhibition, ‘Andrew Gn: Fashioning the World’, is open to the public until February 16, 2026.