The world of haute couture is a mystery to most of us, so it’s a shame that this documentary about Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei, and how she succeeded in being accepted into the lofty Paris-based body known as the Haute Couture Commission, isn’t a little more enlightening.
It begins with Guo Pei telling a group of Chinese women that she will never be accepted. We then see her at home, in Beijing, with her husband, who is also her business partner, talking fondly to her two daughters. Home, she tells us, is “my happy place”. Except that we can’t hear anything she, or anyone else is saying.
No need to adjust your sets, as I tried to for a few seconds. There are no voices at all, disconcertingly. Such sounds as there are in this 50-minute feature consist of artfully added sound effects: music, birdsong, rustling fabrics, the clacking of high heels, the tapping of a computer keyboard and so on.
New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly has deliberately chosen to omit voices, which would matter less if the subtitles were clearer, but it demonstrates the extent to which intonation helps our understanding, even in a foreign language.
But there are glimpses of a fascinating life story here too: of Guo’s elderly parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution, of her grandmother photographed in an embroidered gown from the Qing Dynasty, having had her feet bound and toes crushed, and of a precociously talented little girl who wanted to draw from the age of two.
When she asked her grandmother for a yellow dress, she was told it was forbidden for ordinary people to wear yellow. They were expected to wear the drab uniform of the revolution.
So then of course, those gowns! Guo’s extraordinary embroidered and bejewelled constructions, the more elaborate of which cost her VIP clients upwards of £500,000 speak for themselves. “The weight of the dress and the height of the heels represent responsibility. The more responsibility a woman takes on, the greater she becomes,” says Guo, as one teetering model falls over — crash.
Another model, concealed in a glittering silver boiled egg arrangement with a crucifix on her head, parades very slowly down a catwalk. “I think she can’t see,” Guo mutters.
In spite of claiming to be celebrity-averse, Guo rose to fame after Rihanna wore her spectacular Yellow Empress cape to the Met Ball in 2015. Cruelly dubbed “the Omelette” by the press, the 16ft train, which had more than 50,000 hours worth of hand embroidery, weighed in at 25kg.
While committed fashionistas will love another opportunity to watch this on terrestrial TV — it has already been streamed on Amazon — the rest of us may be left wondering not just about the absurdities of haute couture, but whether any woman would want to be, or indeed should ever be weighed down by such heavy responsibilities.
Yellow Is Forbidden airs at 10pm tonight on BBC Four
