Yirantian Guo started dancing when she was four years old. For spring, she revisited her early passion for the artform. “I called it ‘clap!’” she said with a laugh, explaining that her muse was the Spanish Romani flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya, who, according to her research, was the first woman to wear a men’s suit to dance. “I found this an interesting point to start the collection,” said Guo. “It’s similar to the way I create the female figure.”
Unlike many of her counterparts on the Shanghai Fashion Week calendar, Guo is preoccupied with dressing a more mature customer rather than pursuing a perennially “young” it-girl. It makes her approach to elegance and sex appeal less dependent on trends and coolness and more grounded in self-confidence and sophistication. It’s this that made Amaya a worthy starting point. The performer is often recognized as the best flamenco dancer in history, and is credited for ushering in a new chapter in its history in the early to mid-20th century, bringing flamenco with her from Spain to Latin America and the United States, and eventually Hollywood.
Guo modeled trousers after her, trimming them with bouncy ruffles at the side seams or at the hems. She placed the same frills on modest blouses and diaphanous high-low hem skirts that caressed the floor and then took flight as her models gained momentum. Especially good looking were the larger ruffles that lined the necklines and hips of shorter frocks, and the doubled ruffles that transformed into charming bubble hems on pencil skirts. A pale pink shorts suit was an outlier, but it was Guo’s most faithful and modern interpretation of Amaya in this collection.
Where the show really found its rhythm was in a couple of loosely draped halter blouses, sumptuous knit tanks, and liquidy trousers and skirts cut in expressive light silks: They best conveyed the elusive but familiar fluidity of dance and the way in which music moves through one’s body. “The wave of the body is a language,” said Guo.