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 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 ... 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, calligraphy, paintings and ceramics—obsessions that Gn would by Cao Xueqin, which provided Gn with what he says were his “earliest encounters of descriptions of fashion and true luxury”.
