HOMECOMING KING

After building his fashion legacy over the better part of the past three decades, Paris-based Singaporean designer Andrew Gn reflects on the influence of his multicultural identity and how he intends to champion the next generation of Asian designers

- Pameyla Cambe

Well before he dressed some of the world’s most powerful women or launched his namesake fashion brand in Paris, before he assisted the legendary French fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro, or even moved to London to study at the prestigious Central Saint Martins, Andrew Gn’s initiation into fashion took place in a library.

Gn reveals that in his childhood home in Singapore, where he lived as a child with his merchant father, homemaker mother and four siblings, “my dad kept a huge library of books. There were a lot of classical Chinese novels. We also had a lot of art books—about modern paintings, about the Old Masters—and books about geography and nature, books about the imperial palace of China and Versailles in France. My first time seeing Picasso was not in a museum, but in a book.” The library was a universe of inspiration, housing his parents’ collections of classical Chinese furniture, Chinese calligraphy, paintings and ceramics—obsessions that Gn would later share. It was also home to the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, which provided Gn with what he says were his “earliest encounters of descriptions of fashion and true luxury”.

Spending time in the library “was a great way to initiate my taste for beauty and for art,” Gn tells Tatler over a digital call in March, while seated in front of a shelf in his Paris home lined with part of his own “library”, which includes fashion books and pottery. “I never run out of inspiration because I have a very diversified and eclectic collection. I collect whatever I like. I follow my own instinct and my subconscious mind … It’s about what I feel.”