issue 7// vol 45 Haute couture beyond our time » ‘Guo Pei: Couture Beyond’ gallery exhibition review Sonam Kaloti Arts Editor G” Pei is one of China’s most renowned and game-changing designers. For over 20 years she has dressed royalty, political elites, and international influencers alike. She has been named in Time Magazine's top 100 most influential people. Her exhibit “Couture Beyond” at the Vancouver Art Gallery showcases over 40 of her creations. The exhibition demonstrates an intersection between art and fashion. It features Guo Pei’s most celebrated runway collections, such as a yellow embroidered cape worn by Rihanna at the 2015 Met Gala, a collaboration with MAC cosmetics, and recent designs which have never been seen before. Many of Guo’s creations are inspired by China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing empire, and traditional craft practices, along with her own ideas on contemporary sensibility. The yellow cape worn by Rihanna was a struggle to make. It took over two years to Photo of Guo Pei by Sonam Kaloti Nostalgia 1n a boring place create due to the surplus amount of details and craftsmanship. The cape weighs 50 pounds and the train is 16 feet long. After creating the cape, Guo was surprised by an offer for it. “A few years later Rihanna contacted my husband and wanted to borrow this piece. | didn’t know who Rihanna was! [...] I didn’t think celebrities wearing this was the best setting, however the inner beauty of Rihanna, and this yellow cape, turned out to be a great collaboration,” said Guo through an English translator during a media tour at the gallery. The entire exhibit features a theme of desaturated colours paired with detailed gold embroidery. There are also a lot of red shades and floral designs on many creations, which are heavily influenced by Chinese culture. Two unique but beautiful colours used by Guo include diluted mint greens and lavenders. Most of the creations in the exhibit are made of thick and heavy materials, including furry fabrics and metallic details on the shoes, headdresses, and main pieces. Guo plays a lot with folds of > ‘It’s Boring Here, Pick Me Up’ film review Jerrison Oracion Senior Columnist keen Ware the 2000s were not a very long time ago, they are as special as every other decade. When the last season of CNN’s The 2000s was shown, it brought back the nostalgia of what we had just gone through. There is also a surge of films that bring back memories of a recent past, such as Lady Bird, which takes place between 2002 and 2003, a Japanese film called Sunny which goes back to the 1990s, and a new film called It’s Boring Here, Pick Me Up, which had its world premiere in the Vancouver International Film Festival this year and releases in Japan this Friday. Based on a book by Mariko Yamauchi, Ryuichi Hiroki has made a film about people going back to their hometown and remembering moments in their lives that they wanted to forget. The film begins in 2013 when a woman (Ai Hashimoto) asks a server for the whereabouts of her former classmate, Shiina (Ryo Narita). Next, she sees her best friend and they go on a tour of her hometown, which she was very bored of when she lived there prior to moving to Tokyo. They go to an arcade where they used to hang out a lot. There she sees a former boyfriend (Mugi Kadowaki) still playing his favourite game and all of them reminisce about their past. The film goes through a loop of flashbacks between 2004 and 2010 to show why some of the characters regret what they did during that time before going back to the present. The characters also encounter other people that they know, such as Shiina’s sister. There are a lot of scenes that were shot in one take to make it feel like you are with the characters. The flashback scenes fabric, twisting and turning folds on the undersides of dresses into swirls and floral patterns. She also uses the folding of fabric as a medium to add dimension to many of the articles on display, making some parts appear taller and using the added layer textures as signatures for the pieces themselves. Guo is unique in the design of her additional pieces of shoes and headdresses. Many shoes toy with the addition of empty space within the heel, and many have jewels and tassels dangling in the empty space, accompanying the stylistic colour palette and theme of the entire work. Similarly, most of the body pieces have supplementary headdresses, ranging from painted crowns to decorative plants (and even some traditional vases). Most prevalent throughout the pieces are themes of nature, which pair elegantly with the soft colour palettes of all the designs. The embroidery on all of Guo’s works is full of wonderful, intricate details, signifying that she truly is a master of her craft. are very nostalgic, showing Japan in the 2000s paired with a soundtrack comprised of songs from that decade. The film even plays a song by Saboten (a very popular band in that decade) in one scene—a track which was their biggest song in 2004. During the world premiere of It’s Boring Here, Pick Me Up in the VIFF, Hiroki and Hashimoto introduced the film and did a Q&A after the screening. This was Hashimoto’s first time visiting Vancouver. lasked Hiroki if there is a surge of nostalgic films, to which he answered that he did not intend to make a film that brought back nostalgia, but to make a film about people going back to their past. He added that his high school years were not fun. Also, I asked Hashimoto if she drew Eh Rw AA CO Photos by Billy Bui ‘It's Boring Here, Pick Me Up’ promotional image a upon any personal experiences when they were filming. She told me that while she did not use her personal experiences, she did draw from her interests, especially during the scenes in the arcade. Like the title of the film, Hashimoto described her character as bored or average because she just goes to her hometown and is not excited about it, compared to the eccentric characters that she’s played in her other films. Going back to your hometown can be full of reminiscing and maybe boring, as shown in It’s Boring Here, Pick Me Up.