Yirantian Guo turned her fall 2024 showspace into a courtroom. Guests sat on wooden benches and had placed leather-bound briefings on each seat. If The Good Wife happened during Fashion Week, Guo’s show was exactly what that would look like.
But Guo’s inspiration was not a fabricated character or a woman who exists only within the confines of primetime television (or a streaming platform and a Sunday afternoon binge). “It’s about the working woman,” Guo said backstage after the show, “it’s what she wears every day and what she feels comfortable in.” Case in point, a media executive sitting a few seats over in a full look from the collection couldn’t help but exclaim look after look: “This is for me! It’s what I wear!”
Guo is a staple at Shanghai Fashion Week; she’s been a part of the the Labelhood schedule from the very beginning of her showcase, which is also when she launched Yirantian after she graduated from the London College of Fashion in 2014 and returned to Shanghai. Yirantian, as Guo describes it, is about dressing “the urban woman expressing a sense of strength with non-aggressive sexiness.”
At one point in its long and storied history, Shanghai became known as “the Paris of the East,” a nickname that nodded at its penchant for decadence and glitz. While the city has since outgrown the moniker to rise as a fashion capital in its own right, this idea of sophistication and glamour still permeates many of its inhabitants—particularly those in the upper echelons. Guo leans into this particular pocket of Shanghainese style and explores its nuances, approaching sensuality through the city’s particular, and oftentimes mature, sartorial language.
Guo cut her tailoring sharp and her skirts short, carving vertiginously plunging necklines in her shirting and evening sheaths to contrast fun knit cummerbunds and playful floating shirt collars; both of which delicately subverted the masculine power uniform. She draped suitings into tailored tube tops and leather-trimmed capelets, and fashioned funky trousers and top coats out of shaggy colorblocked shearlings. Guo is often at her best when she takes the contemporary and pushes it into new, kooky territories. This is where her proposal for the working wardrobe took the most compelling shape this season, where she ruled in favor of a woman whose sensuality is rooted in intrigue rather than downright sexiness.
