ANDREW GN'S well-heeled customers, in Paris for the haute couture collections, are busy booking appointments with the designer, all of them eager to order pieces from his effortlessly chic ready-to-wear collection or special exclusively made pieces. For them, the shopping experience is on a level well out of reach for most, with his salon creating the experience a client might have had 50 years ago at Schiaparelli, Chanel or Dior. Customers lounge around in intimate surroundings filled with artworks and antiques. They sip champagne and nibble on macaroons while a house model shows off the clothes.
This level of service is tailored exclusively to high-end clientele who treasure their privacy. Clients include actresses Michelle Yeoh and Li Bingbing, socialite Patty Ho as well as celebrities such as Beyonce Eva Mendes, Amy Adams, Middle Eastern royalty and prominent Europeans and Americans.
Between 60 and 70 per cent of his clientele are working women and many are from mainland China - it helps that he's fluent in Mandarin and French. 'When a Chinese multi-billionaire shops, she doesn't necessarily want people around - this is the world we cater for,' says Gn. 'I feel couture is important, but women do not necessarily have time for five fittings. It's time consuming and we are trying to modernise it.' Now he will make a toile (test garment) and send that with one of the team to be pinned and fitted on the client, the dress being subsequently made from that. 'It's much easier that way and we are very precise.'
Gn is innately drawn to luxury. Even in his early days when he was designing T-shirts, it had to be cashmere. He is renowned for his ornate embellishment and love of plush fabrics, and is one of the few to still make everything in France, which 'makes a hell of a difference'. Clients come to him for his coats, shirts and blouses, and his dresses, which sell in stores from Harrods in London to Barneys in New York, David Jones in Sydney to The Swank in Hong Kong. 'My goal is to design something that cannot be copied in 48 hours by fast fashion,' he says. Jackets start at US$3,500 and gowns at US$10,000, but special pieces are considerably more.
Born in Singapore, Gn trained at Central St Martins in London and the Domus Academy in Milan in the 1980s, with the designer spending a few years working at Emanuel Ungaro in Paris before launching his eponymous label in 1996. His mother, who is Chinese-Japanese and now in her 80s, wore lots of Valentino, Chanel and Chlo?, and he credits her style for influencing his approach to fashion.
Gn's late father, who was of Chiu Chow ancestry, and migrated from China to Singapore in the 1930s just before the war, made his money selling mother-of-pearl to cosmetics firm Shiseido, financing investments in property and other areas. His parents were great connoisseurs and collectors of the arts, and would travel around the auction houses of Europe and America with their three sons and two daughters in tow (Andrew, in his mid-40s, is the youngest sibling). It was the perfect learning environment to develop his personal taste for arts and antiques. He admits that if he hadn't gone into fashion, he would've studied at London's Victoria & Albert Museum or Sotheby's to become a curator or auctioneer. 'I decided to make fashion my career and collecting antiques my hobby,' he says.
