Zixuan Guo is the designer making fashion faux pas fashionable
Welcome to CHEW THE FAT WITH…, our long-form profile series where we invite you to sit down with fashion’s next generation as they dig deep into their memories. To chew some fat - defined as an informal conversation brimming with small talk - we encourage you to pull up a chair and take a big old bite as we spill the tea on the life and work of the industry’s need-to-knows. Just remember to mop up after yourself.
Turning embarrassing moments into the next fashion thing, designer Zixuan Guo’s ethos of always seeing the silver linings in life makes for an unforgettable – and rather funny - final collection.
A skirt unknowingly tucked into your underwear, the dreaded trailing remnants of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe... We’ve all been there. The dreaded fashion mishap right when we need it least. And yet, for this CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS designer, turning ‘oops’ into art is her modus operandi. As she concludes her time on the Graduate Diploma at London’s renowned institution, ZIXUAN GUO is bringing humour to perhaps our most embarrassing memories.
We meet in the toilets of the Barbican – the only place we could find shelter from the 40mph winds forecast for our shoot on the City of London estate. Peeping over the suitcase lid, a petite Guo emerges with an infectious grin. Despite running off many sleepless nights finishing the collection, the energetic designer continues to mumble “it’s beautiful” and “how wonderful” under her breath. With a pin pressed between her teeth, I find her fiddling with the stretch fabric on the model, working to show the perfect amount of skin - tucking and twisting satin whilst using the models own underwear as a canvas for her collection, perhaps aptly titled Embarrassing Moment.
“There are many details in life that can be embarrassing,” she tells me. “Life always trips us up inadvertently. Just like the dress being lifted by the wind, the exposed underwear, an entangled skirt. The important thing is how we get along with these embarrassments and how we see silver linings in life.”
Fashion mishaps have been slapped right in front of our faces from as early as I can remember. The celebrity collages on the cover of OK! Magazine, the never-ending headlines in the Daily Mail, they start to become more famous than the celebrities themselves. Marilyn Monroe’s infamous dress flare up over a subway grating in The Seven Year is testimony to that, superseding the iconography of the film itself. Like Monroe, Guo attempts to capture the beauty in embarrassing moments – instead of clothing working in opposition with the wearer, both the body and garment are intertwined as one.
In many of Guo’s outfits, there is no end and no beginning - no traditional or conventional pattern cutting. Instead, the multi-layered deconstructed fabrics use large slits to expose the bras and knickers, juxtaposed against the harsh linear tailoring and wide ‘80s power suit jackets. An anarchistic distortion and contortion combine a dishevelled boyfriend shirt with superhero costume. One look even features a neckline so high it could substitute as a face mask. How very Covid-friendly.
Guo’s creativity stems from her family back in China. “My father is an interior designer, and my mother is the owner of a clothing store, so I have a lot of subtle enlightenment on design and fashion,” she says. With creativity in the blood, Guo believed her calling would be architecture, as she was exposed to the unique ethnic styled buildings in her hometown, the Chinese-minority Dong Nationality. However, it was an emotional connection that persuaded her to study Womenswear at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology instead. Guo explains: “Fashion can reshape a person’s spirit, state and emotions. It can penetrate the bones of people.”
“Fashion can reshape a person’s spirit, state and emotions. It can penetrate the bones of people.”
Guo believes women are complex and fearless and therefore their clothes should reflect this. She says: “As a female designer, I want to emphasise that the power of women comes from women themselves and is innate.” In the collection, stereotypical female garments such as hosiery are used in unusual ways - a flesh-coloured pair of tights are ruched to make an abstract structural shape on the front of one of the pieces and inside-out tailored trouser pockets are transformed into a garter belt swinging from the hips. “In my design series, I really like the form of the skirt turned upside down, and I like the combination of printing and fabrics with special properties, all of which are metaphorical for the characteristics and circumstances of women,” she adds.
For this young designer, fashion is the ultimate unifier. While her collection is humorous in concept, it manages to convey a deeper meaning that speaks to all women, no matter where they come from. “I think a good design has a soul,” she reflects. “It is not only about beautiful clothes, but also a spiritual world that carries designers through their garments.” Undoubtedly, the importance of storytelling and trust is integral in her vision for womenswear.“In the future my brand will encourage women to find themselves and discover their power,” Guo tells me as we wrap the shoot and escape from the winds with red cheeks. “I want to help women find confidence and courage – to be bold and fearless.”
Photography by LOWRI COOPER